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SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 
ON OUR FRONT 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

ON OUR FRONT 



BY 

WILLIAM L. STIDGER 

T. M. C. A. WORKER WITH THE A. E. F. 



ILLUSTRATED BY 

JESSIE GILLESPIE 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1918 



COPYBIGHT, 1918, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER's SONS 
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1918 



,si1 



OCT 30 191B 







TO 

DOCTOR ROBERT FREEMAN 

PIONEER BELIQIOD8 WORK DIRECTOR 
OF IDE T. M. C. A. 

AND THE HUNDREDS OF PREACHER-SECRETARIES 

WHO ARE SERVING SO BRAVELY AND EFFICIENTLY 

ON THE CRUSADE OF SERVICE IN FRANCE 

AND TO THE CHURCHES THAT SENT THEM 



FOREWORD 

Some human experiences that one has 
in France stand out like the silhouettes of 
mountain peaks against a crimson sunset. 
I have tried in this book to set down some 
of those experiences. I have had but one 
object in so doing, and that object has 
been to give the father and mother, the 
brother and sister, the wife and child and 
friend of the boys "Over There" an accu- 
rate heart-picture. I have not attempted 
the too great task of showing the soul of 
the soldier, although I have tried to pic- 
ture him at some of his great moments 
when he forgets himself and rises to glori- 
ous heights, just as he might do at home 
if the opportunity called. 

I have tried to show his experiences on 
the transports, when he lands in France, 
his welcome there, the reactions of the 



viii FOREWORD 

trench life; something of his self-sacrifice, 
his willingness to serve even unto the end; 
his courage, his sunshine. I have also given 
some other pictures of France that aim to 
show his heart-relations to his allies and to 
the folks at home. 

If I have done this, sufficient shall be 
my reward. 



CONTENTS 



FAGB 



I. Silhouettes of Song 1 

II. Ship Silhouettes 21 

III. Silhouettes of Sacrifice 28 

IV. Silhouettes Spiritual 42 

V. Silhouettes of Sacrilege .... 59 

VI. Silhouettes of Silence 69 

VII. Silhouettes of Service 87 

VIII. Silhouettes of Sorrow 102 

IX. Silhouettes of Suffering .... 130 

X. Soldier Silhouettes 147 

XI. Sky Silhouettes 163 

XII. The Lights of War 166 

XIII. Silhouettes of Sunshine 187 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

" Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as 

mine?" Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

"What are those dots on the sun?" Doctor Freeman 

shouted to me 22 

The upturned roots of an old tree were just in front . 78 

"The last seen of Dale he was gathering together a 

crowd of little children " 88 

"The boys call her 'The Woman with Sandwiches 

and Sympathy' " 104 

What was the difference ? He had gotten a letter . . 142 

One night I had the privilege of seeing a plane caught 

by the search-light 178 

The air-raid had not dampened her sense of humor . 202 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 

^T^HE great transport was cutting its 
•*■ sturdy way through three dangers: 
the submarine zone, a terrific storm beating 
from the west against its prow, and a night 
as dark as Erebus because of the storm, 
with no lights showing. 

I had the midnight-to-four-o'clock-in- 
the-morning "watch" and on this night 
I was on the "aft fire-control.'* Below me 
on the aft gun-deck, as the rain pounded, 
the wind howled, and the ship lurched 
to and fro, I could see the bulky forms 
of the boy gunners. There were two to 
each gun, two standing by, with telephone 
pieces to their ears, and six sleeping on 
the deck, ready for any emergency. The 
greatcoats made them look like gaunt men 
of the sea as they huddled against their 
guns, watching, waiting. I wondered what 



2 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

they could see in that impenetrable dark- 
ness, if a U-boat could even survive in 
that storm; but Uncle Sam never sleeps 
in these days, and this transport was 
especially worth watching, for it carried 
a precious cargo of wounded officers and 
men back to the homeland, west bound. 

For an hour I had heard no sound from 
the boys on the gun-deck below me. When 
I was on watch in the daylight I knew 
them to be just a great crowd of fine, 
buoyant, happy American lads, full of 
pranks and play and laughter, but they 
were strangely silent to-night as the ship 
ploughed through the storm. The storm 
seemed to have made men of them. They 
were just boys, but American boys in these 
days become men overnight, and acquit 
themselves like men. 

I watched their silent forms below me 
with a great feeling of wonderment and 
pride. The ship lurched as it swung in its 
zigzag course. Then suddenly I heard a 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG S 

sweet sound coming from one of the boys 
below me. I think that it was big, raw- 
boned "Montana" who started it. It was 
low at first and, with the storm and the 
vibrations of the ship, I could not catch 
the words. The music was strangely fa- 
miliar to me. Then the boy on the port 
gun beside "Montana" took the old hymn 
up, and then the two reserve gunners who 
were standing by, and then the gunners 
on the starboard side, and I caught the 
old words of 

"Jesus, Saviour, pilot me 

Over life's tempestuous sea; 
Unknown waves before me roll 
Hiding rock and treacherous shoal; 

Chart and compass came from Thee; 

Jesus, Saviour, pilot me." 

Above the creaking and the vibrations 
of the great ship, above the beating of the 
storm, the gunners on the deck below, all 
unconsciously, in that storm-tossed night 
were singing the old hymn of their memories, 



4 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

and I think that I never heard that won- 
derful hymn when it sounded sweeter to 
me than it did then, as the second verse 
came sweetly from the lips and hearts of 
those gunners: 

"As a mother stills her child 
Thou canst hush the ocean wild; 
Boistrous waves obey Thy will 
When Thou sayst to them, ' Be still.' 
Wondrous Sovereign of the sea, 
Jesus, Saviour, pilot me." 

We hear a good deal of how our boys 
sing "Hail! Hail! The Gang's All Here' , 
and "Where Do We Go From Here, 
Boys ? " as a ship is sinking. I know Ameri- 
can soldiers pretty well. I do not know 
what they sang when the Tuscania went 
down, but I am glad to add my picture to 
the other and to say that I for one heard a 
crowd of American gunners singing "Jesus, 
Saviour, Pilot Me Over Life's Tempestuous 
Sea." The mothers and fathers of America 
must know that the average American boy 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 5 

will have the lighter songs at the end of 
his lips, but buried down deep in his heart 
there is a feeling of reverence for the old 
hymns, and whether he sings them aloud 
or not they are there singing in his heart; 
and sometimes, under circumstances such 
as I have described, he sings them aloud 
in the darkness and the storm. 

If you do not believe this because you 
have been told so often by magazine corre- 
spondents, who see only the surface things, 
that all the boys sing is ragtime, let Bishop 
McConnell, of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church, tell you of that Sunday evening 
when, at the invitation of General Byng, 
he addressed, under the auspices of the 
Y. M. C. A., a great regiment of the 
Scottish Guards. That night, in a shell- 
destroyed stone theatre, he spoke to them 
on "How Men Die." In a week from that 
night more than two-thirds of them had 
been killed. When Bishop McConnell asked 
them what they would like to sing, this 



6 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

great crowd of sturdy, bare-kneed soldiers 
of democracy, who had borne the brunt of 
battle for three years, asked for "O God, 
Our Help in Ages Past." 

Yes, I know that the boys sing the rag- 
time, but this must not be the only side of 
the picture. They sing the old hymns, too, 
and memories of nights "down the line," 
when I have heard them in small groups 
and in great crowds singing the old, old 
hymns of the church, have burned their 
silhouettes into my memory never to die. 

One night I remember being stopped by 
a sentry at "Dead Man's Curve," because 
the Boche was shelling the curve that 
night, and we had to stop until he "laid 
off," as the sentry told us. Between shells 
there was a great stillness on the white 
road that lay like a silver thread under 
the moonlight. The shattered stone build- 
ings, with a great cathedral tower standing 
like a gaunt ghost above the ruins, were 
tragically beautiful under that mellow light. 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 7 

One almost forgot there was war under the 
charm of that scene until "plunk ! plunk ! 
plunk !" the big shells fell from time to 
time. But the thing that impressed me 
most that waiting hour was not the beauty 
of the village under the moonlight, but the 
fact that the lone sentry who had stopped 
us, and who amid the shelling stood si- 
lently, was unconsciously singing an old 
hymn of the church, "Rock of Ages, 
Cleft for Me." I got down from my 
truck and walked over to where he was 
standing. 

"Great old hymn, isn't it, lad?" 

"I'll say so," was his laconic reply. 

"Belong to some church back home?" 
I asked him. 

"Folks do; Presbyterians," he replied. 

"Like the old hymns?" I asked. 

"Yes, it seems like home to sing 'em." 

I didn't get to talk with him for a few 
minutes, for he had to stop another truck. 
Then he came back. 



8 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

i "Folks at home, Sis and Bill and the kid, 
mother and father, used to gather around 
the piano every Sunday evening and sing 
'em. Didn't think much of them then, but 
liked to sing. But they mean a lot to me 
over here, especially when I'm on guard at 
nights on this 'Dead Man's Curve.' Seems 
like they make me stronger." As I walked 
away I still heard him humming "Rock of 
Ages, Cleft for Me." 

One of the most vivid song silhouettes 
that I remember is that of a great crowd 
of negroes singing in a Y. M. C. A. hut. 
There must have been a thousand of them. 
I was to speak to them on "Lincoln Day." 
I remember how their white teeth shone 
through the semidarkness of that candle- 
lighted hut, and how their eyes gleamed, 
and how their bodies swayed as they sang 
the old plantation melodies. 

The first song startled me with the uni- 
versality of its simple expression. It was an 
adaptation of that old melody which the 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 9 

negroes have sung for years, "It's the Old- 
Time Religion." 

A boy down front led the singing. A curt 
"Sam, set up a tune," from the Tuskegee 
colored secretary started it. 

This boy sat with his back to the audi- 
ence. He didn't even turn around to face 
them. Low and sweetly he started singing. 
You could hardly hear him at first. Then a 
few boys near him took up the music. Then 
a few more. Then it gradually swept back 
over that crowd of men until every single 
negro was swaying to that simple music, 
and then it was that I caught the almost 
startlingly appropriate words: 

"It is good for a world in trouble; 
It is good for a world in trouble; 
It is good for a world in trouble; 
And it's good enough for me. 

It's the old-time religion; 
It's the old-time religion; 
It's the old-time religion; 
And it's good enough for me. 



10 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

It was good for my old mother; 

It was good for my old mother; 

It was good for my old mother; 

And it's good enough for me.*' 

Then much to my astonishment they 
did something that I have since learned is 
the very way that these songs grew from 
the beginning. They extemporized a verse 
for the day, and they did it on the spot. I 
made absolutely certain of that by careful 
investigation. They sang this extra verse: 

"It was good for ole Abe Lincoln; 

It was good for ole Abe Lincoln; 

It was good for ole Abe Lincoln; 

And it's good enough for me." 

"That first verse, 'It is good for a world 
in trouble,' is certainly a most appropri- 
ate one for these times in France,' ' I said 
aside to the secretary. 

"Yes," he replied; "if ever this pore ole 
worl' needed the sustainin' power of the 
religion of the Christ, it does now; an' if 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 11 

ever this pore ole worP was in trouble, that 
time suttinly is right now," he added with 
fervor. 

And now I can never think of the world, 
nor of the folks back here at home, nor of 
the millions of our boys over there that I 
do not hear the sweet voices of that crowd 
of negroes singing reverently and fervently: 

"It is good for a world in trouble; 
It is good for a world in trouble; 
It is good for a world in trouble; 
And it's good enough for me." 

Another Silhouette of Song that stands 
out against the background of memory is 
that of a hymn that I heard in Doctor 
Charles Jefferson's church just before I 
sailed for France. I was lonely. I walked 
into that great city church a stranger, as 
thousands of boys who have sailed from 
New York have done. I never remember 
to have been so unutterably lonely and 
homesick. It was cold in the city, and I 



12 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

was alone. I turned to a church. Thousands 
of boys have done the same, may the 
mothers and fathers of America know, and 
they have found comfort. If the parents of 
this great nation could know how well 
their boys are guarded and cared for in 
New York City before they sail, they would 
have a feeling of comfort. 

I sat down in this great church. I was 
thinking more of other Sabbath mornings 
at home, with my wife and baby, than any- 
thing else. A hymn was announced. I stood 
up mechanically, but there was no song in 
my throat. There was a great lump of lone- 
liness only. But suddenly I listened to the 
words they were singing. Had they selected 
that hymn just for me ? It seemed so. It so 
answered the loneliness in my heart with 
comfort and quiet. That great congrega- 
tion was singing: 

"Peace, perfect peace; 
With loved ones far away; 
In Jesus' keeping, we are safe; and they." 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 13 

A great sense of peace settled over my 
heart, and I have quoted that old hymn 
all over France to the boys, and they have 
been comforted. Many a boy has asked 
me to write him a copy of that verse to 
stick in his note-book. It seemed to give a 
sense of comfort to the lads, for their loved 
ones, too, were "far away," and since I 
have come home I find that this, too, 
comes as a great comfort hymn to those 
who are here lonely for their boys "over 
there." 

And who shall forget the silhouette of 
approaching the shores of France by night 
as they have sailed down along the coast, 
cautiously and carefully, to find the open- 
ing of the submarine nets ? Who shall forget 
the sense of exhilaration that the news that 
land was near brought? Who shall forget 
the crowding to the railings by all on 
board to scan anxiously through the night 
for the first sight of land? Then who shall 
forget seeing that first light from shore 



14 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

flash out through the darkness of night? 
Who shall forget the red and green and 
white lights that began to twinkle, and 
gleam, and flash, and signal, and call? 
How beautiful those lights looked after the 
long, dangerous, eventful, and dark voyage, 
without a single light showing on the ship ! 
And who shall forget the man along the 
railing who said, "I never knew before the 
meaning of that old song, 'The Lights 
Along the Shore'"? And then who can 
forget the fact that suddenly somebody 
started to sing that old hymn, "The Lights 
Along the Shore," and of how it swept 
along the lower decks, and then to the 
upper decks, until a whole ship-load of 
people was singing it? And then who shall 
forget how somebody else started "Let the 
Lower Lights Be Burning"? Can such 
scenes ever be obliterated from one's mem- 
ory? No, not forever. That silhouette re- 
mains eternally ! 

Five great transports were in. They were 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 15 

lined up along the docks in the locks. A 
Y. M. C. A. secretary was standing on the 
docks yelling up a word of welcome to the 
crowded railings of the great transports. 
The boats were not "cleared " as yet. It 
would take an hour, and the secretary 
knew that something must be done, so he 
started to lead first one ship and then an- 
other in singing. 

"What shall we sing, boys?" he would 
shout up to them from the docks below. 
Some fellow from the railing yelled, "Keep 
the Home Fires Burning,'* and that fine 
song rang out from five thousand throats. 
I have heard it sung in the camps at home, 
I have heard it sung in great huts in France, 
but I never heard it when it sounded so 
significant and so sweet in its mighty 
volume as it sounded coming from that 
great khaki-lined transport, which had 
just landed an hour before in France. I 
stood beside the song-leader there on the 
docks looking up at that great mass of 



16 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

American humanity, a hundred feet above 
us, so far away that we could not recognize 
individual faces, on the high decks of one 
of the largest ships that sails the seas, and 
as that sweet song of war swept out over 
the docks and across the white town, and 
back across the Atlantic, I said to myself: 
"That volume sounds as if it could make 
itself heard back home." 

The man beside me said: "The folks 
back home hear it all right, for they are 
eagerly listening for every sound that comes 
from that crowd of boys. Yes, the folks back 
home hear it, and they'll 'keep the home 
fires burning' all right. God bless them !" 

The last Silhouette of Song stands out 
against a background of green trees and 
spring, and the odor of a hospital, and Red 
Cross nurses going and coming, and boys 
lying in white robes everywhere. My friend 
the song-leader had gone with me to hold 
the vesper service in the hospital. Then 
we visited in the wards in order to see those 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 17 

who were so severely wounded that they 
could not get to the service. 

There was a little group of men in one 
room. The first thing I knew my friend had 
them singing. At first they took to it awk- 
wardly. Then more courageously. Then 
sweetly there rang through the hospital 
the strains of "My Daddy Over There.'' 

It melted my heart, for I have a baby 
girl at home who says to the neighbors, 
"My daddy is the prettiest man in the 
world," and believes it. I said to Cray: 
"Why did you sing that particular song?" 

"Oh," he replied, "my baby's name is 
* Betty,' and I found a guy whose baby's 
name is 'Betty' too, and we had a sort of 
club formed; and another guy had a baby 
boy, and then I just thought they'd like 
to sing 'My Daddy Over There.' But we 
ended up with 'Jesus, Lover of My Soul,' 
so that ought to suit you." 

"Suit me, man? Why I got a 'Betty' 
baby of my own, and that 'Daddy Over 



18 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

There* song you sang is the sweetest thing 
I've heard in France, and it will help those 
daddies more than a hymn would. I'm glad 
you got them to singing." 

And now I'm back home, and I thought 
the Silhouettes of Song were all over, but I 
stepped into a church the other Sunday. 
Up high above the sacred altars of that 
church fluttered a beautiful silk service 
flag. It was starred in the shape of a letter 
"S." In the circle of each "S" was a red 
cross. The church had two members in the 
Red Cross. Above the "S" and below it 
were two red triangles. The church had 
men in the service of the Y. M. C. A. Then 
grouped about the "S" were the stars of 
boys in the service. 

As I looked up at this cross a flood of 
memories swept over me. I could not keep 
back the tears. All the love, all the loneli- 
ness, all the heartache, all the pride, all 
the hope of the folks at home, their rever- 
ence, their loyalty, was summed up in that 



SILHOUETTES OF SONG 19 

flag. I stood to sing, my eyes brimming 
with tears. The great congregation started 
that beautifully sweet hymn that is being 
sung all over America in the churches in 
loving memory of the boys over there: 

"God save our splendid men, 
Send them safe home again, 

God save our men. 
Make them victorious, 
Patient and chivalrous, 
They are so dear to us, 

God save our men. 

God keep our own dear men, 
From every stain of sin, 

God keep our men. 
When Satan would allure, 
When tempted, keep them pure, 
Be their protection sure — 

God keep our men. 

God hold our precious men, 
And love them to the end, 

God hold our men. 
Held in Thine arms so strong 
To Thee they all belong. 
This ever be our song: 

God hold our men." 



20 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

I stood the pressure until that great con- 
gregation came to that line "They are so 
dear to us," and the voice of the mother 
beside me broke, and she had to stop. 
Then I had to stop, too, and we looked at 
each other through our tears and smiled 
and understood, so that when she sweetly 
said, "I have a boy over there," her words 
were superfluous. And so I have added 
another memory of song to the hours that 
will never die. 



II 

SHIP SILHOUETTES 

TT was nearing the dawn, and flaming 
-*- heralds gave promise of a brilliant day 
coming up out of France to the east. Three 
of us stood in the "crow's-nest" on an 
American transport, where we had been 
standing our "watch" since four o'clock 
that morning. 

Suddenly as we peered through our glasses 
off to the west we saw the masts of a great 
cruiser creeping above the horizon of the 
sea. We reported it to the "bridge," where 
it was confirmed. Then in a few minutes 
we saw another mast, and then another, 
and another; four, five, six, seven, eight, 
nine, ten, twenty — five, six — twenty-six 
ships coming up over the western horizon, 
bound for France, bearing the most precious 
burden that ever a caravan of the sea car- 
ried across the waters of the deep; American 

boys ! Your boys ! 

21 



22 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

It was a marvellous sight. We had been 
so intently watching this that we had 
forgotten about the dawn. Then we turned 
for a minute, and off to the east a brilliant 
red dawn was splashing its way out of the 
sea. 

"What are those dots on the sun?" 
Doctor Freeman shouted to me. 

"Why, I believe it's the convoy of de- 
stroyers coming out to meet those trans- 
ports," I replied. 

Then before our eyes, up out of the 
eastern horizon, just as we had watched 
the transports and the cruiser come up 
over the western horizon, those slender 
guardians of the deep came toward us in 
formation. There were ten of them, and they 
met the great American convoy just abreast 
our transport. We saw the American flag 
fly to the winds on each ship, and the flash- 
ing of signal-lights even in the dawning. 

"Those destroyers coming out of the 
east against that sunrise remind me of the 




"What are those dots on the sun?" Doctor Freeman 
shouted to me. 



SHIP SILHOUETTES 23 

experiences one has in France in these 
vivid war days," I said to my fellow watcher 
in the "crow's-nest." 

"How is that?" 

"They stand out like the Silhouettes of 
Mountain Peaks against a crimson sunrise," 
I replied. 

And so have many Silhouettes of the Sea 
stood out. 

There was the afternoon that we stood 
on the deck of a ship bound for France. 
The voyage had been full of dangers. 
Submarines had harassed us for days. One 
night such a lurch came to the ship as threw 
everybody about in their staterooms. We 
thought it was a storm until the morning 
came, and we were informed that it was 
a sudden lurch to avoid a submarine. The 
voyage had been full of uneasiness, and 
now we were coming to the most dangerous 
part of it, the submarine zone. 

Everybody was on deck. It was Sunday 
afternoon. Suddenly off to the east several 



24 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

spots appeared on the horizon. What were 
they, friendly craft or enemy ships? 

Nobody knew, not even the captain. 
There was a wave of uneasiness over the 
boat. 

Speculation was rife. 

Then we saw the signal boy go aft, and 
in a moment the tricolor of France was 
fluttering in the winds, and we knew that 
the approaching craft were friendly. Then 
through powerful glasses we could make 
them out to be long, low-lying, lithe, swift 
destroyers coming out to meet us. They 
were a welcome sight. Like "hounds of the 
sea" they came, long and lean. Headed 
straight for us, they came like the winds. 
Then suddenly a slight mist began to fall, 
but not enough to obscure either the de- 
stroyers or the sun. Through this mist the 
sun burned its way, and almost as if a mir- 
acle had been performed by some master 
artist, a beautiful rainbow arched the sky 
to the east, and under the arch of this 



SHIP SILHOUETTES 25 

rainbow fleetly sailed those approaching 
destroyers. 

It was a beautiful sight, a Silhouette of 
the Sea never to be forgotten while memory 
lasts. The French flag fluttered, the band 
started to play the "Marseillaise," and a 
ship-load of happy people sang it. 

A sense of peace settled down over us 
all. The rainbow, covenant of old, promise 
of the eternal God to his people, seemed 
to have new significance that memorable 
day. 

Another Silhouette of the Sea! Troops 
are expected in at a certain port of entry. 
The camp has been emptied of ten thou- 
sand men. That means but one thing, that 
new troops are expected. The great dirigi- 
bles sailed out a few hours ago. The sea- 
planes followed. Thousands of American 
men and women lined the docks waiting, 
peering with anxious eyes out toward the 
"point." Here at this point a great cape 
jutted out into the ocean, and around this 



26 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

cape we were accustomed to catch sight 
of the convoys first. 

A sense of great expectancy was upon 
us. We had heard rumors of submarines off 
the shore for several days. Then suddenly 
we heard a terrific cannonading, and we 
knew that the transports and the convoys 
were in a battle with the U-boats that 
had lain in wait for them. An anxious hour 
passed. The sun was setting and the west 
was a great rose blanket. 

Then a shout went up far down the line 
of waiting Americans as the first great 
transport swung around the cape. Then 
another, and a third and a fourth, and 
finally a fifth; great gray bulks, two of 
them camouflaged until you could not 
tell whether they were little destroyers or 
a group of destroyers on one big ship. Then 
they got near enough to see the American 
boys, thousands of them, lining the rail- 
ings. Through the glasses we could make 
out the names of the transports. They were 



SHIP SILHOUETTES 27 

some of the largest that sail the Atlantic. 
When as they came slowly in on the full 
tide, with that rose sunset back of them, 
the bands on their decks playing across the 
waters, and five thousand boys on the first 
boat singing "Keep the Home Fires Burn- 
ing," then the "Marseillaise," and finally 
"The Star-Spangled Banner," in which the 
crowd on the shore joined, there was a 
Silhouette of the Sea that burned its way 
into our souls. 

There were the great ships, and beyond 
them the cape, and beyond that the 
hovering dirigibles, and beyond them the 
great bird seaplanes, and beyond them the 
background of a rose-colored sky, and 
beyond that the memories of home. 



Ill 

SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE 

T^VERY day for two months, February 
"■—' and March, sometimes when the roads 
were hub-deep with mud, and sometimes 
when the roads were a glare of ice and snow 
and driving the big truck was dangerous 
work, we passed the crucifix. 

It was the guide-post where four roads 
forked. One road went up to the old mon- 
astery, where we had, in one corner, a 
canteen. Another road led down toward 
divisional headquarters. Another road led 
into Toul, and a fourth led directly toward 
the German lines, over which, if we had 
driven far enough, as we started to do one 
night in the dark, we could have gone 
straight to Berlin. 

The first night that I went "down the 
line" alone with a truck-load I was trem- 
bling inside about directions. The divisional 
man said: "Go straight out the east gate of 

28 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE 29 

the city, down the road until you come to 
the cross at the forks of the road. Take the 
turn to the left." 

But even with these directions I was not 
certain. I was frankly afraid, for I knew 
that a wrong turn would take me into 
German lines. I did not like that prospect 
at all. 

I drove the big car cautiously through the 
night. There were no lights, and at best 
it was not easy driving. This night was im- 
penetrably dark. When I came to the cross- 
roads I stopped the machine and climbed 
down. I wanted to make sure of the direc- 
tions, and they were printed in French on 
the sign-board that was near the crucifix 
about which he had told me. 

I got my directions all right, and then, 
moved by curiosity, flashed my pocket- 
light on the figure of the bronze Christ on 
the crucifix there at the crossroads guide- 
post. There was an inscription. Laboriously 
finding each small letter with my flash in 



30 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

the darkness, my engine panting off to the 
side of the road, I spelled it all out: 

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great 
a grief as mine ? " 

Off in the near distance the star-shells 
were lighting up No Man's Land. "Trav- 
eller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief 
as mine?" they seemed to say to me. 

I climbed into the machine and started 
on. 

Suddenly I heard the purring of Boche 
planes overhead. One gets so that he can 
distinguish the difference between French 
planes and Boche planes. These were Boche 
planes, and they were bent on mischief. 
Then the search-lights began to play in the 
sky over me. But they were too late, for 
hardly had I started on my way when 
"Boom! boom! boom! boom!" one after 
another, ten bombs were dropped, and as 
each dropped it lighted up the surround- 
ing country like a great city in flames. 

As I saw this awful desecration of the 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE 31 

land the phrase of the cross seemed to sing 
in unison with the beating of the engine 
of my truck: 

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great 
a grief as mine ? " 

Suddenly out of the night crept an am- 
bulance train, which passed my slower and 
larger machine. They had no time to wait 
for me. They were American boys on their 
errands of mercy, and the front was calling 
them. I knew that something must be 
going on off toward the front lines, for the 
rumbling of the big guns had been going 
on for an hour. As these ambulances passed 
me — more than twenty-five of them passed 
as silent ships pass in the night — that 
phrase kept singing: "Traveller, hast thou 
ever seen so great a grief as mine?" 

Then I drove a bit farther on my way, 
and off across a field I saw the walls of a 
great hospital. It was an evacuation hos- 
pital, and I had visited in its wards many 
times after a raid, when hundreds of our 



32 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

boys had been brought in every night and 
day, with four shifts of doctors kept busy 
day and night in the operating-room caring 
for them. As I thought of all that I had 
seen in that hospital, again that singing 
phrase of the crucifix at the crossroads 
was on my lips: "Traveller, hast thou ever 
seen so great a grief as mine?" 

A mile farther, and just a few feet from 
the road, I passed a little "God's acre" 
that I knew so well. As its full meaning 
swept over me there in the darkness of 
that night, the heartache and loneliness of 
the folks at home whose American boys 
were lying there, some two hundred of 
them, the old crucifix phrase expressed it all: 
"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great 
a grief as mine?" 

And, somehow, as I drove back by the 
crucifix in the darkness of the next morning, 
about two o'clock, I had to stop again and 
with my flash-light spell out the lettering 
on the cross. 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE 33 

Then suddenly it dawned on me that 
this was France speaking to America: 
"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a 
grief as mine?" 

And when I paused in the darkness of 
that night and thought of the one million 
and a quarter of the best manhood of France 
who had given their lives for the precious 
things that we hold most dear: our homes, 
our children, our liberty, our democracy; 
and when I thought that France had saved 
that for us; and when I remembered the 
funeral processions that I had seen every 
day since I had been in France, and when 
I remembered the women doing the work 
of men, handling the baggage of France, 
ploughing the fields of France; doing the 
work of men because the men were all 
either killed or at the front; when I remem- 
bered the little fatherless children that I 
had seen all over France, whose sad eyes 
looked up into mine everywhere I went; 
and when I remembered the young widows 



34 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

(every woman of France seems to be in 
black) ; and when I remembered the thou- 
sands of blind men and boys that I had 
seen being led helplessly about the streets 
of the cities and villages of France; and 
when I remembered that lonely wife that 
one Sunday afternoon in Toul I had 
watched go and kneel beside a little mound 
and place flowers there — the dates on the 
stone of which I later saw were "March, 
1916," then I cried aloud in the darkness 
as I realized the tremendous sacrifice that 
France has made for the world, as well as 
England and Belgium. "No, France! No, 
England ! No, little Belgium ! this traveller 
has never seen so great a grief as thine !" 

"No, mothers and fathers, little children, 
wives, brothers, sisters of France, and Eng- 
land, and Belgium, this traveller, America, 
has never seen so great a grief as thine !" 

And later I learned, after living in the 
Toul sector for two months, that the chal- 
lenging sentence on the crucifix had been 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE 35 

read by nearly every boy who had passed 
it; and all had. Either he had read it him- 
self or it had been quoted to him, and this 
one crucifix question had much to do with 
challenging the boys who passed it to a new 
understanding of all that France had passed 
through in the war. 

The American boys have learned to re- 
spect the French soldier because of the sac- 
rifice that he has made. The American sol- 
dier remembers that crowd of men called 
"Kitchener's Mob," which Kitchener sent 
into the trenches of France to stem the tide 
of inhumanity, and to whom he gave a 
message: "Go! Sacrifice yourselves while 
I raise an army in England !" The American 
soldier knows all of this. He knows that 
little Belgium might have said to all the 
world, "The forces were too great for us," 
and she could have stepped aside and the 
world would have forgiven her. 

But instead she chose deliberately to 
sacrifice herself for the cause of freedom, 



36 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

and sacrifice herself she did. And that sen- 
tence on the crossroads crucifix in the Toul 
sector, day after day, sends its reminder 
into the heart of the American soldiers, 
who stop their trucks and their ammuni- 
tion wagons, pause their weary marches to 
read it; sends its reminder of the sacrifices 
that our allies have already made, and the 
sacrifices that we may be called upon to 
make. "Traveller, hast thou ever seen so 
great a grief as mine?" 

And the American officer and soldier 
must admit that he has not; and he prays 
God silently in the night as he rides by on 
his horse, or as he drives by on his motor- 
truck, or as he flashes by on his motor- 
cycle, though they may be willing to 
suffer as France has suffered, if need be, 
prays God that that may never be neces- 
sary, for the American soldier, since he 
has been in France, has seen what suffering 
means. 

And so that crossroads crucifix stands 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE 37 

out against the lurid night of France, with 
its reminder constantly before the Ameri- 
can soldier, and it tends to make him more 
gentle with French children and women, 
and more kindly with French men. There 
is a new understanding of each other, a new 
cement of friendship binding our allies 
together in France; there is a new world- 
wide brotherhood breaking across the hori- 
zon of time, coming through sacrifice. 

The world is once again being atoned 
for. Its sin is being washed away. Innocent 
men are suffering that humanity may be 
saved. 

The last time I saw this cross was by 
night. I had seen it first at night, and fitting 
it was that I should see it last at night. 
There was a terrible bombardment down 
the lines. Hundreds of American boys had 
been killed. One was wounded who was 
a son of one of the foremost Americans. 
News of the fight had been coming in to 
us all day long. Night came and "runners" 



38 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

were still bringing in the gruesome details. 
The ambulances were running in a continu- 
ous procession. We had seen things that day 
and night that made our hearts sick. We 
had seen American boys white and uncon- 
scious. We had seen every available room 
in the great evacuation hospital crowded. 
We had been told that a hundred surgical 
cases were in the hospital, mostly shrapnel 
wounds, and that every available doctor 
and nurse was working night and day. 

We had seen, under one snow-covered 
canvas, six boys who had been killed by 
one shell early that morning — boys that 
the night before we had talked with down 
in a front-line hut — boys who had been 
killed in their billet in one room. We had 
seen a captain come staggering into our hut 
wet to the skin, soaked with blood, his hair 
dishevelled, his face haggard. He had been 
fighting since three o'clock that morning. 
He had been shell-shocked, and had been 
sent into the hospital. 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE 39 

"My God !" he cried, "I saw every offi- 
cer in my company killed. First it was my 
first lieutenant. They got him in the head. 
Then about ten o'clock I saw my second 
lieutenant fall. Then early in the afternoon 
my top-sergeant got a bayonet, and a 
hand-grenade got a group of my non- 
commissioned officers. Half of my boys are 
gone." 

Then he sat down and we got him some 
hot chocolate. This seemed to revive his 
spirits, and he said: "But, thank God, we 
licked them ! We licked them at their own 
game ! We got them six to one, and drove 
them back ! No Man's Land is thick with 
their beastly bodies. They are hanging on 
the wires out there like trapped rabbits !" 

Then the thoughts of his own officers 
came back. 

"My God ! Now we know what war 
means. We've been playing at war up to 
this time. Now we've got to suffer ! Then 
we'll know what it all means." He was half- 



40 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

delirious, we could see, and sent for an 
ambulance. 

As I drove home that night I passed the 
crossroads crucifix. This time I needed no 
lights to guide me. The whole horizon was 
alight with bursting shells and Very lights. 
Long before I got to it I could see the gaunt 
form of the cross reaching its black but 
comforting arms up against the background 
of lurid light along the front where I knew 
that American men were dying for me. 
The picture of that wayside cross, looming 
against the lurid light of battle, shall 
never die in my memory. 

It was the silhouette of France and 
America suffering together, a silhouette 
standing out against a livid horizon of fire. 

I needed no tiny pocket search-light to 
read the words on the cross. They had 
already burned their way into my heart 
and into the hearts of that whole division 
of American soldiers, that division which 
has since so distinguished itself at Belleau 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE 41 

Woods ! But now America has a new under- 
standing of the meaning of that sentence, 
for America, too, is suffering, and she is 
sacrificing. 

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great 
a grief as mine?' , 

"Yes, France; we understand now." 



IV 

SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 

FT was the gas ward. I had held a vesper 
■*• service that evening and had had a 
strange experience. Just before the service 
I had been introduced to a lad who said to 
the chaplain who introduced me that he 
was a member of my denomination. 

The boy could not speak above a whis- 
per. He was gassed horribly, and in addi- 
tion to his lungs being burned out and his 
throat, his face and neck were scarred. 

"I have as many scars on my lungs as 
I have on my face," he said quite simply. 
I had to bend close to hear him. He could 
not talk loud enough to have awakened a 
sleeping child. 

He said to me: "I used to be leader 
of the choir at home. At college I was in 
the glee-club, and whenever we had any 
singin* at the fraternity house they al- 

42 



SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 43 

ways expected me to lead it. Since I came 
into the army the boys in my outfit have 
depended upon me for all the music. In 
camp back home I led the singing. Even 
the Y. M. C. A. always counted on me to 
lead the singing in the religious meetings. 
Many's the time I have cheered the boys 
comin' over on the transport and in camp 
by singin* when they were blue. But I 
can't sing any more. Sometimes I get pretty 
blue over that. But I'll be at your meeting 
this evening, anyway, and I'll be right down 
on the front seat as near the piano as I can 
get. Watch for me." 

And sure enough that night, when the 
vesper service started, he was right there. 
I smiled at him and he smiled back. 

I announced the first hymn. The crowd 
started to sing. Suddenly I looked toward 
him. We were singing "Softly Now the Light 
of Day Fades Upon My Sight Away." His 
book was up, his lips were moving, but no 
sound was coming. That sight nearly broke 



44 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

my heart. To see that boy, whose whole 
passion in the past had been to sing, whose 
voice the cruel gas had burned out, started 
emotions throbbing in me that blurred my 
eyes. I couldn't sing another note myself. 
My voice was choked at the sight. A lump 
came every time I looked at him there with 
that book up in front of him, a lump that 
I could not get out of my throat. I dared 
not look in his direction. 

After the service was over I went up to 
him. I knew that he needed a bit of laughter 
now. I knew that I did, too. So I said to 
him: "Lad, I don't know what I would 
have done if you hadn't helped us out on 
the singing this evening." 

He looked at me with infinite pathos and 
sorrow in his eyes. Then a look of triumph 
came into them, and he looked up and 
whispered through his rasped voice: "I 
may not be able to make much noise any 
more, and I may never be able to lead the 
choir again, but I'll always have singing 



SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 45 

in my soul, sir ! I'll always have singing in 
my soul ! " 

And so it is with the whole American 
army in France — it always has singing in 
its soul, and courage, and manliness, and 
daring, and hope. That kind of an army 
can never be defeated. And no army in the 
world, and no power, can stand long be- 
fore that kind of an army. 

That kind of an army doesn't have to be 
sent into battle with a barrage of shells in 
front of it and a barrage of shells back of 
it to force it in, as the Germans have been 
doing during the last big offensive, accord- 
ing to stories that boys at Chateau-Thierry 
have been telling me. The kind of an army 
that, in spite of wounds and gas, "still has 
singing in its soul" will conquer all hell on 
earth before it gets through. 

Then there is the memory of the boys 
in the shell-shock ward at this same hos- 
pital. I had a long visit with them. They 
were not permitted to come to the vesper 



46 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

service for fear something would happen 
to upset their nerves. But they made a 
special request that I come to visit them 
in their ward. After the service I went. I 
reached their ward about nine, and they 
arose to greet me. The nurse told me that 
they were more at ease on their feet than 
lying down, and so for two hours we stood 
and talked on our feet. 

"How did you get yours?'' I asked a 
little black-eyed New Yorker. 

"I was in a front-line trench with my 
* outfit,' down near Amiens," he said. "We 
were having a pretty warm scrap. I was 
firing a machine-gun so fast that it was 
red-hot. I was afraid it would melt down, 
and I would be up against it. They were 
coming over in droves, and we were mow- 
ing them down so fast that out in front of 
our company they looked like stacks of 
hay, the dead Germans piled up every- 
where. I was so busy firing my gun, and 
watching it so carefully because it was so 



SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 47 

hot, that I didn't hear the shell that sud- 
denly burst behind me. If I had heard it 
coming it would never have shocked me." 

"If you hear them coming you're all 
right?" I asked. 

"Yes. It's the ones that surprise you that 
give you shell-shock. If you hear the whine 
you're ready for them; but if your mind 
is on something else, as mine was that day, 
and the thing bursts close, it either kills 
you or gives you shell-shock, so it gets you 
both going and coming." He laughed at 
this. 

"I was all right for a while after the 
thing fell, for I was unconscious for a half- 
hour. When I came to I began to shake, and 
I've been shaking ever since." 

"How did you get yours?" I asked an- 
other lad, from Kansas, for I saw at once 
that it eased them to talk about it. 

"I was in a trench when a big Jack 
Johnson burst right behind me. It killed 
six of the boys, all my friends, and buried 



48 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

me under the dirt that fell from the para- 
pet back of me. I had sense and strength 
enough to dig myself out. When I got out 
I was kind of dazed. The captain told me 
to go back to the rear. I started back 
through the communication-trench and 
got lost. The next thing I knew I was wan- 
dering around in the darkness shakin' like 
a leaf." 

Then there was the California boy. I 
had known him before. It was he who 
almost gave me a case of shell-shock. The 
last time I saw him he was standing on 
a platform addressing a crowd of young 
church people in California. And there he 
was, his six foot three shaking from head 
to foot like an old man with palsy, and stut- 
tering every word he spoke. He had been 
sent to the hospital at Amiens with a case 
of acute appendicitis. The first night he was 
in the hospital the Germans bombed it 
and destroyed it. They took him out and 
put him on a train for Paris. This train had 



SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 49 

only gotten a few miles out of Amiens 
when the Germans shelled it and destroyed 
two cars. 

"After that I began to shake," he said 
simply. 

"No wonder, man; who wouldn't shake 
after that?" I said. Then I asked him if 
he had had his operation yet. 

"It can't be done until I quit shaking." 

"When will you quit?" I asked, with a 
smile. 

"Oh, we're all getting better, much better; 
we'll be out of here in a few months; they 
all get better; 90 per cent of us get back in 
the trenches." 

And that is the silver lining to this Sil- 
houette Spiritual. The doctors say that a 
very large percentage of them get back. 

"We call ourselves the * First American 
Shock Troops,'" my friend from the West 
said with a grin. 

"I guess you are * shock troops,' all right. 
I know one thing, and that is that you 



50 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

would give your folks back home a good 
shock if they saw you." 

Then we all laughed. Laughter was in the 
air. I have never met anywhere in France 
such a happy, hopeful, cheerful crowd as 
that bunch of shell-shocked boys. It was 
contagious. I went there to cheer them up, 
and I got cheered up. I went there to give 
them strength, and came away stronger 
than when I went in. It would cheer the 
hearts of all Americans to take a peep into 
that room; if they could see the souls back 
of the trembling bodies; if they could get 
beyond the first shock of those trembling 
bodies and stuttering tongues. And, after 
all, that is what America must learn to do, 
to get beyond, and to see beyond, the 
wounds, into the soul of the boy; to see 
beyond the blinded eyes, the scarred faces, 
the legless and armless lads, into the glory 
of their new-born souls, for no boy goes 
through the hell of fire and suffering and 
wounds that he does not come out new- 



SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 51 

born. The old man is gone from him, and 
a new man is born in him. That is the 
great eternal compensation of war and 
suffering. 

I have seen boys come out of battles 
made new men. I have seen them go into 
the line sixteen-year-old lads, and come 
out of the trenches men. I saw a lad who 
had gone through the fighting in Belleau 
Woods. I talked with him in the hospital 
at Paris. His face was terribly wounded. 
He was ugly to look at, but when I talked 
with him I found a soul as white as a lily 
and as courageous as granite. 

"I may look awful," he said, "but I'm 
a new man inside. What I saw out there in 
the woods made me different, somehow. I 
saw a friend stand by his machine-gun, with 
a whole platoon of Germans sweeping down 
on him, and he never flinched. He fired that 
old gun until every bullet was gone and 
his gun was red-hot. I was lying in the grass 
where I could see it all. I saw them bayonet 



52 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

him. He fought to the last against fifty 
men, but, thank God, he died a man; he 
died an American. I lay there and cried to 
see them kill him, but every time I think 
of that fellow it makes me want to be 
more of a man. When I get back home I'm 
going to give up my life to some kind of 
Christian service. I'm going to do it be- 
cause I saw that man die so bravely. If he 
can die like that, in spite of my face I can 
live like a man." 

The boys in the trenches live a year in 
a month, a month in a week, a week in a 
day, a day in an hour, and sometimes an 
eternity in a second. No wonder it makes 
men of them overnight. No wonder they 
come out of it all with that "high look" 
that John Oxenham writes about. They 
have been reborn. 

Another wounded boy who had gone 
through the fighting back of Montdidier 
said to me in the hospital: 

"I never thought of anybody else at 



SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 53 

home but myself. I was selfish. Sis and 
mother did everything for me. Everything 
at home centred in me, and everything was 
arranged for my comfort. With this leg gone 
I might have some right now, according to 
the way they think, to that attention, but 
I don't want it any longer. I can't bear the 
thoughts of having people do for me. I 
want to spend the rest of my life doing 
things for other folks. 

"Back of Noyon I saw a friend sail into 
a crowd of six Germans with nothing but 
his bayonet and rifle. They had surrounded 
his captain, and were rushing him back as 
a prisoner. They evidently had orders to 
take the officers alive as prisoners. That 
big top-sergeant sailed into them, and after 
killing two of them, knocking two more 
down, and giving his captain a chance to 
escape, the last German shot him through 
the head. He gave his life for the captain. 
That has changed me. I shall never be the 
same again after seeing that happen. There's 



54 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

something come into my heart. I'm going 
back home a Christian man." 

Yes, America must learn to see beyond 
the darkness, beyond the disfigured face, 
to the soul of the boy. And America will 
do it. America is like that. And so back of 
these shaking bodies and these stuttering 
tongues of the shell-shocked boys I saw 
their wonderful souls. And after spending 
that two hours with them I can never be 
the same man again. 

I could, as Donald Hankey says, "get 
down on my knees and shine their boots 
for them any day," and thank God for the 
privilege. I think that this is the spirit of 
any non-combatant in France who has any 
immediate contact with our men on the 
battle-front or in the hospitals. They are 
so brave and so true. 

"How do the Americans stand dressing 
their wounds and the suffering in the hos- 
pitals ? " a friend of mine asked a prominent 
surgeon. 



SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 55 

"They bear their suffering like French- 
men. That is the highest compliment I can 
pay them,'* he replied. 

And so back of their wounds are their 
immortal, undying, unflinching souls. And 
back of the tremblings of these boys that 
night, thank God, I had the glory of seeing 
their immortal souls, and to me the soul 
of an American boy under fire and pain is 
the biggest, finest, most tremendous thing 
on earth. I bow before it in humility. It 
dazzled mine eyes. All I could think of as 
I saw it was: 

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of 
the Lord." 

That night I said, just before I left: 
"Boys, it's Sunday evening, and they 
wouldn't let you come to my meeting ! 
Would you like for me to have a little 
prayer with you?" 

"Yes ! Sure ! That's just what we want !" 
were the stammered words that followed. 



56 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

"All right; we'll just stand, if it's easier 
for you." 

Then I prayed the prayer that had been 
burning in my heart every minute as we 
stood there in that dimly lit ward, talking 
of home and battle and the folks we all 
loved across the seas. All that time there 
had been hovering in the background of 
my mind a picture of a cool body of water 
named Galilee, and of a Christ who had 
been sleeping in a boat on that water 
with some of his friends, when a storm 
came up. I had been thinking of how 
frightened those friends had been of the 
storm; of the tossing, tumbling, turbulent 
waves. I had thought of how they had trem- 
bled with fear, and then of how they had 
appealed to the Master. I told the boys 
simply that story, and then I prayed: 

"O Thou Christ who stilled the waves 
of Galilee, come Thou into the hearts 
of these boys just now, and still their 
trembling limbs and tongues. Bring a 



SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL 57 

great sense of peace and quiet into their 
souls." 

"Oh, ye of little faith!" When I looked 
up from that prayer, much to my own 
astonishment, and to the astonishment of 
the friend who was with me, the tremblings 
of those fine American boys had perceptibly 
ceased. There was a great sense of quiet and 
peace in the ward. 

The nurse told me the next day that 
after I had gone the boys went quietly to 
bed; that there was little tossing that night 
and no walking the floors, as there had been 
before. A doctor friend said to me: "After 
all, maybe your medicine is best, for while 
we are more or less groping in the dark as 
to our treatment of shell-shock, we do know 
that the only cure will be that something 
comes into their souls to give them quiet 
of mind and peace within." 

"I know what that medicine is," I told 
him. "I have seen it work." 

"What is it?" he asked. 



58 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

Then I told him of my experience. 

"You may be right." 

And so it is all over France; where I have 
worked in some twenty hospitals — from the 
first-aid dressing-stations back through the 
evacuation hospitals to the base hospitals 
— and have found that the reaction of our 
boys to wounds and suffering is always a 
spiritual reaction. I know as I know no 
other thing, that the boys of America are 
to come back, wounded or otherwise, a 
better crowd of men than they went away. 
They are men reborn, and when they come 
back, when it's "over, over there," there is 
to be a nation reborn because of the leaven 
that is within their souls. 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRILEGE 

PXURING the last year there has come 
"■^ into French art a new era of the sil- 
houette. In every art store in Paris one sees 
wonderful silhouettes which tell the story 
of the horror of the Hun better than any 
words can paint it, and when one attempts 
to paint it he must attempt it in word 
silhouettes. 

The silhouette catches the picture better 
than color. Gaunt, naked, ruined cathe- 
drals, homes, towers, and forests are better 
pictured in black silhouettes than any other 
way. There is nothing much left in some 
places in France but silhouettes. 

Those who have seen Rheims know that 
the best reproduction of its ruins has been 
conveyed by the simple silhouette of the 
artist. There it stands outlined against the 
sky. Rheims that was once the wonder of 
the world is now naked ruins, tottering 

59 



60 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

walls, with its towers still standing, loom- 
ing against the sky like tottering trees. 
And when, during the past year, the walls 
fell, they 

"Left a lonesome place against the sky" 

of all the world. 

The church at Albert was like that. Only 
a silhouette can describe or picture it. 
There it stood against the sky by day and 
night, with the figure on its top leaning. 
The old legend of the soldiers that when 
the figure of the Virgin fell to the earth the 
war would end has been dissipated, for 
during the last drive that figure fell, and 
the tower with it. But forever (although it 
has fallen to dust and debris, because of 
descriptions we have seen of it) it shall 
stand out in our memories like a lonely, 
toppling tree against a crimson sunset ! 

Every day on the Toul line we used to 
drive through a village that had been 
shelled until it was in ruins. Only the tower 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRILEGE 61 

and the walls of a beautiful little church re- 
mained. Every other house in the village was 
razed to the ground. Nothing else remained. 
There it stands to this day, for when 
I saw it last in June it was still stand- 
ing as it was in January. Every evening 
about sunset we used to drive down that 
way, taking supplies to the front-line huts. 
Many things stand out in one's memory 
of a certain road over which he drives night 
after night and day after day. There is the 
cross at the forks of the roads. There is 
the old monastery, battered and in ruins, 
that stood out like a gaunt ghost of the 
vandal Hun. There was the little God's 
acre along the road which we passed every 
day. There were always the observation- 
balloons against the evening sky. There 
were always the fleet-winged birds of the 
air outlined against the evening. There were 
always the marching men and the ambu- 
lance trains. But standing out above them 
all, etched with the acid of regret and an- 



62 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

ger and horror, stood that lonely tower. 
Night after night we approached it with 
a beautiful sunset off to the west where 
the Germans lay buried in their trenches. 
Coming back from the German lines we 
would see this church-tower outlined against 
the crimson sky like a finger pointing God- 
ward, and declaring to all the world that 
the God above would avenge this silent, ac- 
cusing Silhouette of Sacrilege. 

There has been a good deal of discussion 
over a certain book entitled "I Accuse." 
I never saw that finger pointing into the 
sky as we drove through this village that 
it did not cry out to the heavens and across 
the short miles to the German Huns, looking 
down, as it did, at its feet where the ruined 
homes lay, the village that it had mothered 
and fathered, the village that had wor- 
shipped within its simple walls, the village 
that had brought its joys and sorrows there, 
the village that had buried the dead within 
its shadows, the village that had brought 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRILEGE 63 

its young there to be married and its aged 
to be buried; there it stood, night after 
night, against the crimson sky sometimes, 
against the golden sky at other times; 
against the rose, against the blue, against 
the purple sunsets; and ever it thundered: 
"I accuse ! I accuse ! I accuse !" 

Then there is that Silhouette of Sac- 
rilege up on the Baupaume Road. This is 
called "the saddest road in Christendom," 
because more men have been killed along 
its scarred pathway than along any other 
road in all the world. Not even the road to 
Calvary was as sad as this road. 

Along this road when the French held 
it, during the first year of the war, they 
gathered their dead together and buried 
them in a little cemetery. Above the sacred 
remains of their comrades these French 
soldiers erected a simple bronze cross as a 
symbol not only of the faith of the nation, 
but a symbol also of the cause in which 
they had died. 



64 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

A few months later when the Germans 
had recaptured this spot, and it had been 
fought over, and the bronze cross still 
stood, the Hun, too, gathered his dead 
together and buried them side by side with 
the French. Then he did a characteristic 
thing. He got a large stone as a base and 
mounted a cannon-ball on top of this stone, 
and left it there, side by side with the 
French cross. 

Whether he meant it or not, his sacrilege 
stands as a fitting expression of his philos- 
ophy, the philosophy of the brute, the re- 
ligion of the granite rock and the iron can- 
non-ball. 

He told his own story here. Side by side 
in those two monuments the contrast is 
made, the causes are placed. One is the 
cause of the cross, the cause of men willing 
to die for brotherhood; the other is the 
cause of those who are willing to kill to 
conquer. 

And these two monuments, side by side 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRILEGE 65 

on the Baupaume Road, stand out as one 
of the Silhouettes of Sacrilege. 

Then there is St. Gervais. On Good 
Friday afternoon a Hun shell pierced the 
side of this beautiful cathedral as the spear- 
thrust pierced the side of the Master so 
long ago. On the very hour that Jesus was 
crucified back on that other and first Good 
Friday the Hun threw his bolt of death 
into the nave of this church, and crucified 
seventy-five people kneeling in memory of 
their Saviour's death. 

I was in that church an hour after this 
terrible sacrilege happened. Never can one 
forget the scene. I dare not describe it 
here in its awful details. 

The entire arches of stone that held up 
the roof had fallen in from the concussion 
of the gases of the shell. Three feet of solid 
stones covered the floor. Men and women 
were being carried out. Silk hats, canes, 
shoes, hats, baby clothes, an expensive fur, 
lay buried in the stone and dirt. 



66 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

As I stood horrified, looking on this scene 
of death and destruction, the phrase came 
into my heart: 

"And the veil of the temple was rent in twain." 

And this scene, too, shall remain as one 
of the Silhouettes of Sacrilege. 

But perhaps the worst Silhouette of Sac- 
rilege that the film of one's memory has 
brought away from France is that of a 
certain afternoon in Paris. 

I happened to be walking along the Bou- 
levard to my hotel. The big gun had been 
throwing its shells into the city all day. 
Suddenly one fell so close to where I was 
walking that it broke the windows around 
me, and I was nearly thrown to my feet. 
In my soul I cursed the Hun, as all who 
have lived in Paris finally come to be doing 
as each shell bursts. But I had more reason 
to curse than I knew at that moment. 

The people were running into a side 
street, the next one toward which I was 



SILHOUETTES OF SACRILEGE 67 

approaching. I followed the crowd. My 
uniform got me past the gendarmes in 
through a little court, up a pair of stairs 
where the shell had penetrated the walls 
of a maternity hospital. 

What I saw there in that room shall 
make me hate the Hun forever. 

New-born babes had been killed, a nurse 
and two mothers. When I thought of the 
expectant homes into which those babes 
had come, when I thought of the fathers 
at the front who would never see again 
either their wives or those new babies, 
when I saw the blood that smeared the 
plaster and floors of that room, when I 
saw the little twisted baby beds, a flush of 
hatred swept over me, as it did over all 
who saw it, a new birth of hatred that 
could never die until those little babies and 
those mothers and the nurse are avenged. 
That is a Silhouette of Sacrilege that makes 
the gamut complete. 

There was the desecration of the holy 



68 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

sanctuaries; there was the desecration of the 
graves of brave soldiers of France; there 
was the derision of his bronze cross; there 
was the desecration of the most sacred day 
in Christendom, Good Friday, and then 
the desecration of little children, mothers 
of new-born babes, and nurses. Could the 
case be more complete? Could Silhouettes 
of Sacrilege cover a wider gamut of hatred 
and disgust than these silhouettes picture ? 



VI 

SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 

f I^WO o'clock in the morning on the sea 
-*■ is sometimes cold and disagreeable, 
and sometimes it is glorious with wonder 
and beauty. But whether it is beautiful or 
whether it is cold and disagreeable, at that 
exact hour in the war zone on every Ameri- 
can transport, now, every boy is summoned 
on deck until daylight. This is only one of 
the many precautions that the navy is 
taking to save life in case of a U-boat 
attack. One thing that ought to comfort 
every mother and father in America is the 
care that is manifested and the precautions 
that are taken by the navy in getting the 
soldiers to France. One of the most thrill- 
ing chapters of the history of this war, when 
it is written, will be that chapter. And one 
of the most wonderful, the most colossal 
feats will be the safe transportation over- 

69 



70 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

seas of those millions of soldiers with so 
little loss of life while doing it. 

And one of the best precautions is this 
of getting every boy up out of the hold 
and out of the staterooms, officers and all, 
on deck, standing by the assigned life-boats 
and rafts. Not a single boy remains below 
in the war zone. 

Day is just breaking across the sea. It is 
a beautiful dawning. Five thousand Ameri- 
can boys line the railings of a certain great 
transport. They are not allowed to smoke. 
They do not sing. They do not talk much. 
Some of them are sleepy, for the average 
American boy is not used to being awakened 
at two in the morning. They just stand and 
wait and watch through five hours of silence 
as the great ship plunges its way defiantly 
through the danger zone, saying in so 
many words: "We're ready for you !" 

And the silhouette of that great ship, 
lined with khaki-clad American boys, wait- 
ing, watching, as seen from another trans- 



SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 71 

port, where the watcher who writes this 
story stands, is a sight never to be equalled 
in art or story. To see the huge bulk of a 
great transport just a stone's throw away, 
moving forward, without a sound from its 
rail-lined, soldier-packed deck, is one of the 
striking Silhouettes of Silence. 

Thomas Carlyle once said of man: 
"Stands he not thereby in the centre of 
Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities ?" 
One day I saw the American army stand- 
ing "in the centre of immensities, in the 
conflux of eternities," at the focus of his- 
tories. One day I saw the American army 
in France march in answer to General Persh- 
ing's offer to the Allies at the beginning of 
the big drive, march to its place in history 
beside its Allies, the English and the French. 

The news came. The first division of 
American troops was to leave overnight 
and march overland into the Marne line. 
Our Allies needed us. They had called. We 
were answering. 



72 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

As a tribute to the efficiency of the 
American army, may I say that the one 
well-trained, seasoned division of troops 
that we had in a certain quiet sector picked 
up bag and baggage overnight and, like 
the Arabs, "silently stole away," and did 
it so well and so efficiently that not even 
the Y. M. C. A. secretaries, who had been 
living with this division intimately for 
months, knew that they were gone, and that 
a new division had taken its place, until 
the next morning. Talk about German 
efficiency — that phrase, "German effi- 
ciency," has become a bugaboo to frighten 
the world. American efficiency is just as 
great, if not greater. 

I saw that division marching overland. 
It was a thrilling sight. Coming on it sud- 
denly, and looking down upon its march- 
ing columns from the brow of a hill, and 
then riding past it in a Ford camionet all 
day long with Irving Cobb, riding past its 
ammunition-wagons, past its machine-gun 



SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 73 

battalion, past its great artillery com- 
pany, past its hundreds of infantrymen, 
past its trucks, past its clean-cut officers 
astride their horses, past its supply-trains, 
past its flags and banners, past its kitchen- 
wagons, seeing it stop to eat, seeing it 
shoulder its rifles, seeing its ambulances 
and its Red Cross groups, seeing its khaki- 
clad American boys wind through the val- 
leys and up the hills and over the bridges 
(the white stone bridge), through its vil- 
lages, many in which American soldiers 
had never been seen before; welcomed by 
the people as the saviors of France, seeing 
its way strewn with the flowers of spring 
by little children, and with the welcome 
and the tears of French mothers and daugh- 
ters clad in black, seeing it march along the 
French streams from early morning until 
late at night, this was a sight to stir the 
pride of any American to the point of rev- 
erence. 

But all day as we rode along that wind- 



74 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

ing trail I thought of the song that the 
soldiers are singing, "There's a Long, Long 
Trail A winding to the Land of Our Dreams,' ' 
and when I looked into the faces of those 
American boys I saw there the determina- 
tion that the trail that they were taking 
was a trail that, although it was leading 
physically directly away from home, and 
toward Berlin, yet it was, to their way of 
thinking, the shortest way home. The trail 
that the American army took that day as 
it marched into the Marne line was the 
"home trail," and every boy marched that 
road with the determination that the sooner 
they got that hard job ahead over with, 
the sooner they would get home. I talked 
with many of them as they stopped to 
rest and found this sentiment on every lip. 
* But it was a silent army. I heard no sing- 
ing all day long — not a song. Men may 
sing as they are marching into training- 
camps; they may sing when they board 
the boats for France now; they may sing 



SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 75 

as they march into rest-billets, but they 
were not singing that day as they marched 
into the great battle-line of Europe. 

I heard no laughter. I heard no loud 
talking, I heard no singing; I heard only 
the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, 
and the crunching of the great motor-trucks, 
and the patter of horses as the officers 
galloped along their lines. That army of 
American men knew that the job on which 
they were entering was not child's play. 
They knew that democracy depended upon 
what they did in that line. They knew that 
many of them would never come back. 
They knew that at last the real thing was 
facing them. They were not like dumb, 
driven beasts. They were men. They were 
American men. They were thinking men. 
They were silent men. They were brave 
men. 

They were marching to their place in 
history unafraid, and unflinching, but 
thoughtful and silent. 



76 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

Another Silhouette of Silence. It was after 
midnight on the Toul line. We were driving 
back from the front. The earth was covered 
with a blanket of snow. Everything was 
white. We were moving cautiously because 
with the snow over everything it was hard 
to tell where the icy road left off and the 
ditches began; and those ditches were four 
feet deep, and a big truck is hard to get 
out of a hole. Then there were no lights, 
for we were too near the Boche bat- 
teries. 

"Halt!" rang out suddenly in the night, 
and a sentry stepped into the middle of 
the road. 

I got down to see what he wanted. 

"There are fifty truck-loads of soldiers 
going into the trenches to-night, and they 
are coming this way. Drive carefully, for 
it is slippery." 

In a few moments we came to the first 
truck filled with soldiers, and passed it. A 
hundred yards farther we came to the 



SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 77 

second one, loaded down with American 
boys. Their rifles were stacked in the front 
of the truck, and their helmets made a 
solid steel covering over the trucks. One 
by one, fifty trucks loaded with American 
soldiers passed us. One can hardly imagine 
that many American boys anywhere with- 
out some noise, but the impressive thing 
about that scene was that not a single 
word, not a sound of a human voice, came 
from a single one of those fifty trucks. 
The only sound to be heard breaking the 
silence of the night was the crunching of 
the chained wheels of the heavy trucks in 
the snow. We watched that strangely silent 
procession go up over a snow-covered hill 
and disappear. Not a single sound of a 
human voice had broken the silence. 

Another Silhouette of Silence: It is an 
operating-room in an evacuation hospital. 
The boy was brought in last night. An 
operation was immediately imperative. I 
had known the boy, and was there by 



78 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

courtesy of the major in charge of the hos- 
pital. The boy had asked that I come. 
, For just one hour they worked, two 
skilled American surgeons, whose names, 
if I were to mention them, would be recog- 
nized as two of America's greatest special- 
ists. France has many of them who have 
given up their ten-thousand-dollar fees to 
endure danger to save our boys. During 
that hour's stress and strain, with sweat 
pouring from their brows, they worked. 
Now and then there was a nod to a nurse, 
who seemed to understand without words, 
and a motion of a hand, but not three words 
were spoken. It made a Silhouette of Si- 
lence that saved a boy's life. 

The next scene is a listening-post. Two 
men are stretched on their stomachs in the 
brown grass. A little hole, just enough to 
conceal their bodies, has been dug there. 
The upturned roots of an old tree that a 
bursting shell had desecrated was just in 
front. "Tap ! Tap ! Tap !" came the sounds 




The upturned roots of an old tree were just in front 



SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 79 

of Bodies at work somewhere near and 
underground. It is needless to say that this 
was a Silhouette of Silence, and that a cer- 
tain Y. M. C. A. secretary was glad when 
it was all over and he got back where he 
belonged. 

The beautiful columns of the Madeleine 
bask under the moonlight. Paris was never 
so quiet. The silence of eternity seemed to 
have settled down over her. As one looked 
at the Madeleine under that magical white 
moonlight he imagined that he had been 
transported back to Athens, and that he 
was no longer living in modern times and 
in a world at war. It was all so quiet and 
peaceful, with a great moon floating in the 
skies 

But what is that awful wail that sud- 
denly smites the stillness as with a blow? 
It seems like the wailing of all the lost souls 
of the war. It sounds like the crying of 
the more than five million sorrowing women 



80 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

there are left comfortless in Europe. It is 
the siren. An air-raid is on. The "alert" is 
sounding. The bombs begin to fall. The 
Boches have gotten over even before the 
barrage is up. Hell breaks loose for an hour. 
No battle on the front ever heard more 
terrific cannonading than the next hour. 
The barrage was the heaviest ever sent up 
over Paris. The six Gothas that got over the 
city dropped twenty-four bombs. 

The terrific bombardment, however, now 
as one looks back, only serves to make the 
preceding silence stand out more emphati- 
cally, and the Madeleine, basking in the 
moonlight the hour before, more beautiful 
in its silhouette of grace and bulk against 
the golden light. 

A month on the front lines with thunder 
beating always, a month of machine-gun 
racket, a month of bombing by Gothas every 
night, a month of crunching wheels, a month 
of pounding motors and rumbling trucks, a 
month of marching men, a month of the 



SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 81 

pounding of horses' hoofs on the hard roads 
of France, a month of sirens and clanging 
church-bells in the tocsin, and then a day 
in the valley of vision, down at Domremy 
where Jeanne d'Arc was born, was a contrast 
that gave a Silhouette of Silence to me. 

One day on the Toul line, a train by 
night, and the next morning so far away 
that all you could hear was the singing of 
birds. Peasants quietly tended their flocks. 
Children played in the roads. The valley was 
beautiful under the sunlight of as warm and 
as beautiful a spring day as ever fell over the 
fields of France. I stood on the very spot 
where the peasant girl of Orleans caught her 
vision. I looked down over the valley with 
"the green stream streaking through it," 
with silence brooding over it, a bewilder- 
ing contrast with the day and the month 
that had just preceded; and it all stands 
out as one of the Silhouettes of Silence. 

Another day, another hour, another part 



82 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

of France. They call it "Calvaire." It covers 
several acres. The peasants go there to 
worship in pilgrimage every year. There is 
a Garden of Gethsemane, with marvellous 
statues built life-size. Then through the 
woods there is a worn pathway to the 
Sanhedrin. This is of marble. Jesus is here 
before his accusers in marble statuary. 

As his accusers question him and he 
answers them not, they wonder. But those 
who have seen "Calvaire" in France do 
not wonder, for from that room there is 
a clean swath of trees cut, and a quarter 
of a mile away looms, on a hill, a real 
Calvary, with the tree crosses silhouetted 
against the sky, and Jesus is seeing down 
the pathway the hill of the cross. 

Then there is "The Way of the Cross," 
built by peasant hands. It is a road covered 
with flintstones as sharp as knives. This 
flint road must be a mile long, and it winds 
here and there leading to Calvary, and 
along its way are the various stations of 



SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 83 

the cross in life-size figures. Jesus is seen 
at every step of this agony bearing his 
cross until relieved by Simon. Over this 
flintstone every year the people come by 
thousands, and crawl on their naked knees 
or walk on their naked feet. Every stone is 
stained with blood; stumbling, cruelly hurt, 
bleeding, they go " The Way of the Cross," 
and I have no doubt but that they go 
back to their homes better men and 
women for having done so. 

The day that we went to "Calvaire" it 
was a fitful June afternoon. As we walked 
along "The Way of the Cross," across the 
field, past the living, almost breathing, 
statues of the Master bearing his cruel 
cross, past the sneering figures of those 
who hated him, and past the weeping 
figures of those who loved and would aid 
him, and as we came to the hill itself, sud- 
denly black clouds gathered behind it and 
rain began to pour. 

"I am glad the clouds are there back of 



84 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

Calvary. I am glad it is raining as we 
climb the hill of Calvary. I am willing to be 
soaked. It seems more fitting so, with the 
black clouds there and all. It reminds me 
of 'The Return from Calvary' in the paint- 
ing," one of the party said impressively. 

Up the winding hill we climbed, and 
there gaunt and cruel against a sombre 
sky stood the three crosses, just as we 
have always imagined them. The hill was 
so high that it overlooked as beautiful a 
valley as I had seen in all France. It was 
in Brittany, as yet untouched by the war 
as far as its fields are concerned (not so its 
men and its women and its homes) ; but on 
that spring day as we looked down from 
the hill of Calvary we could see off in the 
distance the tomb, with the stone rolled 
away, and life-size angels standing there 
with uplifted wings. Then farther along 
the road, perhaps another quarter mile 
away, on another hill, were the figures of 
the disciples, and the women watching the 



SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE 85 

ascension with rapt faces, and a glory shone 
round about them all. 

And as we stood there on that Calvary, 
built in memory of the crucifixion and 
resurrection and ascension of their Master 
by the peasants, and looked down over the 
earth, bright with crimson poppies every- 
where in field and hill, brilliant with the 
old-gold blossom of the broom flower, as 
we stood there, our hearts subdued to awe 
and wonder, looking down, suddenly the 
rain ceased and the sun shone in its full 
glory and lighted anew the white marble 
of the figures of the ascension far below 
us in the field. 
As we stood there the thought came to me: 
"So is the Christian world standing to- 
day on the hill of 'Calvaire.' The storms 
have been black about the Christian world. 
The clouds have seemed impenetrable. 
The earth has been desolate. We have 
walked on our hands and knees and in our 
bare feet up the flinty road of Baupaume, 



86 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

'the saddest road in Christendom,' and 
along this road we have borne the cross. 
We, the Christian world, the mothers, the 
fathers, the little children, have bled. We 
have stumbled and fallen along the way. 
And when we climbed the hill of Calvary, 
as we have been doing for these years of 
war, the clouds darkened and we saw only 
the ominous silhouettes of the three crosses. 

"But the sun is now breaking the clouds, 
and it shall burn its way to a glorious day. 
Across the fields we see the open tomb and 
the resurrection is about to dawn; the day 
of brotherhood, democracy, justice, love, 
and peace forever. 

"Hope is in the world, hope brooding, 
hope dominant, hope triumphant, hope in 
its supreme ascension." 

One could not see this Silhouette of Si- 
lence, this "Calvaire" of the French na- 
tion, and not come away knowing the full 
meaning of the war. It is "The New Cal- 
vary" of the world. 



VII 

SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE 

A NEWSPAPER paragraph in a Paris 
■* *• paper said: "Dale was last seen in a 
village just before the Germans entered 
it, gathering together a crowd of little 
French children, trying to get them to a 
place of safety." 

Dale has never been seen since, and that 
was two months ago. Whether he is dead 
or alive we do not know, but those who 
knew this manly American lad best, say 
unanimously: "That was just like Dale; he 
loved kids, and he was always talking 
about his own and showing us their pic- 
tures." 

No monument will ever be erected to 
Dale, for he was just a common soldier; 
but I for one would rather have had the 
monument of that simple paragraph in the 
press despatches; I for one would rather 

87 



88 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

have it said of me, "The last seen of Dale 
he was gathering together a crowd of little 
children " ; I would rather have died in such 
a service than to have lived to be a part 
of the marching army that is one day to 
enter the streets of Berlin. That was a 
man's way to die; dying while trying to 
save a crowd of little children from the 
cowardly Hun. 

If I had died in that kind of service, in 
my dying moments I could have heard the 
words of John Masefield from "The Ever- 
lasting Mercy" singing in my heart: 

"Whoever gives a child a treat 
Makes joybells ring in Heaven's street; 
Whoever gives a child a home, 
Builds palaces in Kingdom Come; 
Whoever brings a child to birth, 
Brings Saviour Christ again to earth." 

Or, better, I would have seen the Master 
blessing little children, taking them up in 
His arms and saying to the Hebrew mothers 
that stood about with wondering eyes: 




"The last seen of Dale he was gathering together a crowd 
of little children." 



SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE 89 

"Suffer the little children to come unto 
me, and forbid them not, for of such is 
the kingdom of heaven." 

And perhaps I should have heard the 
echo of Joaquin Miller's sweet interpreta- 
tion of that scene, for when men die, strange, 
sweet memories, old hymns and verses, old 
faces, all come back: 

"Then lifting His hands He said lowly, 
Of such is my Kingdom, and then 
Took the little brown babes in the holy 
White hands of the Savior of men; 
Held them close to His breast and caressed them; 
Put His face down to theirs as in prayer; 
Put His cheek to their cheeks; and so blessed them 
With baby hands hid in His hair." 

And I am certain that last of all I should 
have heard the voice of the Master himself 
saying: 

"Insomuch as ye have done it unto the 
least of one of these little ones, my chil- 
dren, ye have done it unto me." 

Thank God for a death like that. One 



90 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

could envy such a passing, a passing in the 
service to little children. 

I have seen some of the most magnificent 
episodes of service on the part of men in 
France, scenes that have thrilled me to the 
bone. 

I know a Protestant clergyman in France 
who walked five miles on a rainy February 
day to find a rosary for a dying Catholic 
boy. 

I know a Y. M. C. A. secretary who in 
America is the general secretary of one of 
the largest organizations in one of the 
largest Eastern cities. He has always had 
two hobbies: one is seeing men made 
whole, and the other has been fighting 
cigarettes. Never bigger fists or more de- 
termined fists pounded down the walls 
that were building themselves up around 
American youth in the cigarette industry. 
He was militant from morning till night in 
his crusade against cigarettes. Some of his 
friends thought he was a fanatic. He even 



SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE 91 

lost friends because of his uncompromising 
antagonism to the cigarette. 

But the last time I heard of him he 
was in a front-line dugout. This was near 
Chateau-Thierry. The boys were coming 
and going from that awful fight. Men would 
come in one day and be dead the next. He 
had been with them for months, and they 
had come to love him in spite of his fighting 
their favorite pastime. They knew him for 
his uncompromising antagonism to ciga- 
rettes. They loved him none the less for that 
because he did not flinch. Neither was he 
narrow about selling them. He sold them 
because it was his duty, but he hated them. 

Then for three days in the midst of 
the Chateau-Thierry fighting the matches 
played out. Not a match was to be had for 
three days. The boys were frantic for their 
smokes, for the nervous strain was greater 
than anything they had suffered in their 
lives. The shelling was awful. The noise 
never ceased. Machine-gun fire and bomb- 



92 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

ing by planes at night kept up every hour. 
They saw lifelong friends fall by their 
sides every hour of the day and night. 
They needed the solace of their smokes. 

Their secretary found two matches in his 
bag. He lit a cigarette for a boy, and the 
match was gone. Then he used the other 
one. Then he did a magnificent piece of 
service for which his name shall go down 
forever in the memory of those lads. For- 
ever shall he hold their affections in the 
hollow of his hands. He proved to those 
boys that his sense of service was greater 
than his prejudices. He kept three ciga- 
rettes going for two days and two nights 
on the canteen beside him, smoking them 
himself in order that that crowd of boys, 
coming and going into the battle, in and 
out of the underground dugout, might 
have a light for the cigarettes during the 
few moments of respite that they had from 
the fight. 

What a thrill went down the line when 



SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE 93 

that news got to the boys out there in the 
woods fighting. One boy told me that a 
fellow he told wept when he heard it. 

Another said: "Good old ! I knew he 

had the guts !" Another said: "I'll say he's 
a man !" Another came in one evening and 
said: "I'm going to quit cigarettes from now. 
If you're that much of a man, you're worth 
listening to!" Another said: "If I get out 
of this it's me for the church forever if it 
has that kind of men in it !" 

Is it any wonder that they brought their 
last letters to him before they went into the 
trenches ? Is it any wonder that they asked 
him for a little prayer service one night 
before they went into the trenches? Is it 
any wonder that they love him and swear 
by him? 

Is it any wonder that when one of them 
was asked how they liked their secretary, 
the boy said: "Great ! He's a man !" 

Is it any wonder that when another boy 
was asked if their secretary was very re- 



94 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

ligious, responded in his own language: 
"Yes, he's as religious as hell, but he's a 
good guy anyhow !" 

That kind of service will win anybody, 
and that is exactly the kind of service that 
the boys of the American army, your boys, 
are getting all over France from big, heroic, 
unprejudiced, fatherly, brotherly men, who 
are willing to die for their boys as well as 
to live for them and with them down where 
the shells are thickest and the dangers are 
constant. 

More than a hundred Y. M. C. A. men 
gassed and wounded to date, and more 
than six killed. One friend of mine stepped 
down into his cellar one morning, got a full 
breath of gas, and was dead in two minutes. 
There had been a gas-raid the day before, 
and the gas had remained in the cellar. 
Another I know stayed in his hut and served 
his men even though six shell fragments 
came through the hut while he was doing 
it. Another I know lived in a dugout for 



SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE 95 

three months, under shell fire every day. 
One day a shell took off the end of the old 
chateau in which he was serving the men. 
His dugout was in the cellar. But he did 
not leave. Another day another shell took 
off the other end of the chateau, but he 
did not leave. He had no other place to go, 
and the boys couldn't leave, so why should 
he go just because he could leave if he 
wished ? That was the way he looked at it. 
One man whom I interviewed in Paris, a 
Baptist clergyman, crawled four hundred 
yards at the Chateau-Thierry battle with a 
young lieutenant, dragging a litter with 
them across a stubble wheat-field under a 
rain of machine-gun bullets and shells, in 
plain view of the Germans, and rescued a 
wounded colonel. When they brought him 
back they had to crawl the four hundred 
yards again, pushing the litter before them 
inch by inch. It took them two hours to 
get across that field. A piece of shrapnel 
went through the secretary's shoulder. He 



96 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

is nearly sixty years of age, but he did 
not stop when a service called him that 
meant the almost certain loss of his own 
life. 

I know another secretary, Doctor Dan 
Poling, a clergyman, and Pest, a physical 
director, who carried a wounded German, 
who had two legs broken, through a bar- 
rage of German shells across a field to safety. 

But all the Silhouettes of Service are 
not in the front lines. 

There are two divisions to the army. 
They used to be "The Zone of Advance" 
and "The Zone of the Rear." Now they call 
the second division "The Services of Sup- 
plies." All the men who are not in the 
actual fighting belong to "The Services of 
Supplies." 

"How many men does it take to keep 
one pilot in the machine flying out over 
those waters to guard the transports in?" 
I asked the young ensign in charge of a 
seaplane station. 



SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE 97 

"Twenty-eight," he replied. "There are 
twenty-eight men back of every machine 
and every pilot." 

The service that these men render, al- 
though it is hard for them to see it, is just 
as real and just as heroic as the service 
of those in the front lines. The boys in 
"The Services of Supplies" are eager to 
get up front. I have had the joy of making 
them see in their huts and camps that 
their service is supremely important. 

One cannot tell what service is more im- 
portant. 

When I landed at Newport News, the 
first sound that I heard was the machine- 
gun hammering of thousands of riveters 
building ships. I know how vital that ser- 
vice is to the boys "over there." They could 
not live without the ships. 

Then I came from Newport News to 
Washington, on my way home, and we 
entered that great city by night. The Capitol 
dome was flooded with light. As I looked 



98 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

at it I said to myself: "To-day from this 
city emanates the light of the world. The 
eyes of the whole of humanity are turned 
toward this city. That lighted dome is 
symbol of all this." 

As I looked out of the train window as 
we entered Washington from Richmond, 
Virginia, I thought: "Surely not the ship- 
building but the ideals that go out from 
the Capitol are the most important * Ser- 
vices of Supplies.' " 

The next morning I was in Pittsburgh. 
As my train pulled into that great city, all 
along the Ohio River I saw great armies 
of laboring men going and coming from 
work. As one tide of humanity flowed out 
of the mills across the bridges, another 
flowed in, and I said: "Surely not the ship- 
builders, nor the ideal-makers at Washing- 
ton, but this great army of laboring men 
in America forms the most important part 
of 'The Services of Supplies' !" 

Then I came to New York. In turn I 



SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE 99 

spoke before two significant groups of men 
and women. One was a group of women 
meeting each day to make Red Cross band- 
ages, and knowing the scarcity of such in 
France, and knowing how at times nurses 
have had to tear up their skirts to bandage 
wounds of dying boys, I said: "Surely this 
is it!" 

Then I spoke before the artists of New 
York, with Mr. Charles Dana Gibson head- 
ing them, and as I had seen their stirring 
posters everywhere arousing the nation 
to action, and knew what an important 
part the artists and writers in France had 
played in "The Services of Supplies," I 
said: "Surely these are the most impor- 
tant !" 

But I have found at last that none of 
these are the most important of all. There 
is another section to "The Services of Sup- 
plies," and that is more important than the 
mechanic behind the pilot, more important 
than the man who assembles the motor 



100 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

trucks and the ambulances in France, more 
important than the ship-builders, more 
important than the lawmakers themselves, 
more important even than the President, 
more important than that great army of 
laborers which I saw in Pittsburgh, more 
important than the artists and the Red 
Cross workers, and that supreme and im- 
portant part of the great "Services of Sup- 
plies" is the father and mother, the wife, the 
child, the home, the church, the great mass 
of the common thinking, feeling, suffering, 
praying, hoping people of America. If 
these fail, all fails. If these lose faith and 
courage and hope, all lose faith and courage 
and hope. If these grow faint-hearted, all 
before them lose heart. These are they who 
furnish the real sinews of war. These are 
they who must furnish the morale, the love, 
the letters, the prayers, the support to both 
government and soldier. Yes, the common 
folks over here at home, I have seen 
clearly, are the most important part of 



SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE 101 

the great division of the army that we 
call "The Services of Supplies." May we 
never fail the boy in France. 
These are the Silhouettes of Service. 



VIII 

SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 

T WONDERED at his hold on the hearts 
-*• of the boys in a certain hospital in 
France. It was a strange thing. I went 
through the hospital with him and it seemed 
to me, judging by the conversation with 
the boys in the hundreds of cots, that he 
had just done something for a boy, or he 
was just in the process of doing something, 
or he was just about to do something. 

They called him "daddy." 

All day long I wondered at his secret, for 
he was so unlike any man I had seen in 
France in the way he had won the hearts of 
the boys. I was curious to know. Some- 
thing in his eyes made me think of Lincoln. 
They had a look like Lincoln in their depths. 

That night when I was about to leave I 
blunderingly stumbled on his secret. About 
the only ornament in his bare pine room in 

102 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 103 

the hut was a picture on the desk. I seized 
on it immediately, for next to a sweet-faced 
baby about the finest thing on earth to 
look at is a boy between five and twelve. 
And here were two, dressed in plaid suits, 
with white collars, tousled hair, clean, fine 
American boys. 

I exclaimed as I picked the picture up: 
"What a fine pair of lads !" 

Then I knew that I had, unwittingly, 
stumbled into his secret, for a look of in- 
finite pain swept over his face. 

"They are both dead. Last August wife 
called me on the phone and said that some- 
thing awful had happened to the boys. 
They were all we had, and I hurried home. 

"They had gone out on a Boy Scout 
picnic. The older had gone in swimming in 
the river and had gotten beyond his depth. 
The younger went in after him and both 
were drowned." 

"I'm sorry I brought it back," I said 
humbly. 



104 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

He didn't notice what I said, but went on. 

"Wife and I were broken-hearted. There 
didn't seem much to live for. We had lost 
all. Then came this Y. M. C. A. work, and 
we thought that we would like to come over 
here and do for all the boys in the army 
what we could not do for our own. And now 
wife and I are here, and every time I do 
something for a wounded boy in this hos- 
pital, I feel as if I were serving my own dear 
lads." 

"And you are," I said. "And if the 
mothers and fathers of America know that 
men and women of your type are here 
looking after their lads it will give them a 
new sense of comfort and you will be serv- 
ing them also." 

"And my wife," he added. "You know 

the boys up at call her 'The Woman 

with the Sandwiches and Sympathy.' She 
got her name because one night a drunken 
soldier staggered into the hut and asked 
for her. He didn't remember her name, but 




"The boys call her 'The Woman with Sandwiches and 
Sympathy.' " 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 105 

she had darned his socks, she had written 
letters for him, she had mothered him, she 
had tried to help him. They wanted to put 
the poor lad out, but he insisted upon see- 
ing my wife. Finally, in desperation, seeing 
that he couldn't think of her name, he said, 
'Wan' see that woman wif sandwiches and 
sympathy,' and after that the name stuck." 

And as we knelt in prayer together there 
in the hut and I arose to clasp his hand in 
sympathy, I knew that through service 
there in France, through service to your 
sons, mothers and fathers of America, this 
brave man, as well as his wife, were solac- 
ing their grief. They were conquering sor- 
row in service, thank God. 

Yes, there are Silhouettes of Sorrow, but 
these silhouettes always have back of them 
the gold of a new dawn of hope. They are 
black silhouettes, but they have a glorious 
background of sunrise and hope. I tell of 
no sorrows here that are not triumphant 
sorrows, such as will hearten the whole 



106 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

world to bear its sorrow well when it 
comes, pray God. 

Up at on the beautiful Loire is 

my friend the secretary. It is a humble 
position, and there are not many soldiers 
there, but he is serving and brothering, 
tenderly and faithfully, the few that are 
there. No one would ever think of him as a 
hero, but I do. He, too, is a hero who is 
conquering sorrow in service. 

His only daughter had been accepted for 
Y. M. C. A. service in France. She was all 
he had. He was a minister at home, and had 
given up his church for the duration of the 
war. Both were looking forward with keen 
anticipation to her coming to France. Then 
came the cable of her death. 

I was there, the morning it arrived, to 
preach for him. He said no word to me 
about the blow. We went on with the ser- 
vice as usual. I noticed that no hymns had 
been selected, and that things were not in 
very good order for the service. I was a 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 107 

little annoyed at this, but I am thankful 
with all my heart this day that I said 
nothing. I had decided in my heart that 
he was not a very efficient religious di- 
rector until I heard the next day. 

When I asked him why he had not told 
me, he said a characteristic thing: "I didn't 
want to spoil the service. I thought I would 
keep my grief in my own heart and fight 
it out alone." 

And fight it out he did. Letters kept 
coming for several weeks after the cable, 
letters full of girlish hope about France, 
and full of joy at the thoughts of seeing 
"daddy" soon. This was the hardest of all. 
He could not tear up those precious let- 
ters. Her last words and thoughts were 
treasures; all that he had left; but they 
were spear-thrusts of pain also. But bravely 
he fought out his battle of grief, and ten- 
derly he ministered, mothers and fathers of 
America, to your boys. Is it any wonder 
that they loved him, that they went to him 



108 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

with their loneliness and their heartaches; 
is it any wonder that he understood all 
the troubles that they brought and that 
they bring to him? 

And then there was the young secretary 
who had just landed in France. It had been 
hard to leave home, especially hard to 
leave that little tot of a six-year-old girl, 
the apple of his eye. 

Some of us who have such experiences 
will understand this story; some of us who 
remember what the parting from loved ones 
meant when we went to France. One such 
I remember vividly. 

There was the night before in the hotel 
in San Francisco, when "Betty," six-year- 
old, said, "Don't cry, mother. Be brave 
like Betty," and who even admonished her 
daddy in the same way, "Don't cry, 
daddy! Be brave like Betty!" for it was 
just as hard for the daddy to keep the tears 
back, as he thought of the separation, as 
it was for the mother. 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 109 

Then the daddy would say to the mother: 
"I feel ashamed of myself to cry when I 
think of the thousands of daddies and hus- 
bands who are leaving their homes, not for 
six months' or a year's service, but 'for the 
period of the war,' and leaving with so 
much more of a cloud hanging over them 
than I. I have every hope that I will be 
back with you in six or eight months, but 
they " 

"Yes, but your own grief will make you 
understand all the better what it means to 
the daddies in the army who leave their 
babies and their wives, and oh, dear, be 
good to them!" 

Then there was the next morning at the 
Oakland pier as the great transcontinental 
train pulled out, when the little six-year-old 
lady for the first time suddenly saw what 
losing her daddy meant. She hadn't visual- 
ized it before. Consequently, she had been 
brave, and had even boasted of her bravery. 
But now she had nothing to be brave about, 



110 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

for as the train started to move she sud- 
denly burst into sobs and started down the 
platform after the train as fast as her 
sturdy little legs could carry her, crying 
between sobs, "Come back, daddy! Come 
back to Betty ! Don't go away !" with her 
mother after her. 

The daddy had no easy time as he 
watched this tragedy of childhood from the 
observation-car. It was a half-hour before 
he dared turn around and face the rest of 
the sympathetic passengers. 

Going back on the ferry to San Francisco 
the weeping did not cease. In fact it be- 
came contagious, for a kindly old gentle- 
man, thinking that the little lady was 
afraid of the boat, said: "What's the mat- 
ter, dear ? Are you afraid ? " 

"No, sir, I'm not afraid; but my daddy's 
gone to France, and I want him back! I 
want my daddy ! I want my daddy !" and 
the storm burst again. Then here and there 
all over the boat the women wept. Here 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 111 

and there a man pulled a handkerchief out 
of his pocket and pretended to blow his 
nose. 

And so we understand what it meant to 
this young secretary when, upon landing 
in France, he got the cable telling of the 
death of his baby girl. 

At first he was stunned by the blow. 

Then came a brave second cable from 
his wife telling him that there was nothing 
that he could do at home; to stay at his 
contemplated task of being a friend to the 
boys. 

The brave note in the second cable gave 
him new spirit and new courage, and in 
spite of a heavy heart he went into a can- 
teen, and will any wonder who read this 
story that he has won the undying devo- 
tion of his entire regiment by his tireless 
self-sacrificing service to the American boys ? 

What triumphs these are, what triumphs 
over sorrow and pain. 

All of France is filled with these Sil- 



112 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

houettes of Sorrow, but each has a back- 
ground of triumphant, dawning light. 

There was the woman and child that I 
saw in the Madeleine in Paris, both in 
black. They walked slowly up the steps 
and in through the great doors to pray for 
their daddy aviator, who had been killed a 
year before. 

A man at the door told me that every 
day they come, that every day they keep 
fresh the memory of their loved one. 

"But why does she come so long after 
he is dead?" I asked. 

"She comes to pray for the other avi- 
ators," he added simply. 

It was a tremendous thing to me. I went 
into the great, beautiful cathedral and 
reverently knelt beside them in love and 
thankfulness that no harm had come to 
my own wife and baby. But the memory 
of that woman's brave pilgrimage of prayer 
each day for a year, "for the other aviators," 
the picture of the woman and child kneel- 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 113 

ing, etched its way into my soul to remain 
forever. 

"As I shot down through the night, falling 
to what I was certain was immediate death, 
I had just one thought," a young aviator 
said, as we sat talking in a hotel in Paris. 

I said: "What was it?" 

"I said to myself: 'What will the poor 
kiddie do without his dad?'" 

Then there is that Silhouette of Sorrow 
that my friend brought back from Ger- 
many, he who was on the Peace Ship Com- 
mission, and who saw a train-load of Ger- 
man boys leaving a certain German town 
to fill in the gaps caused by the losses at 
Verdun; and because this sorrow is char- 
acteristic of the mother sorrow of the 
whole world, and especially of the American 
mother, and because it has a note of won- 
derful triumph, I tell it. 

"I thought they were the hardest women 
in the world," he said, "for as I watched 
them saying farewell to their boys there 



114 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

wasn't a tear. There was laughter every- 
where, shouting and smiles, as if those poor 
boys were going off to school, or to a picnic, 
when we all knew that they were going to 
certain death. 

"I felt like cursing their indifference to 
the common impulses of motherhood. I 
watched a thousand mothers and women 
as that train started, and I didn't see a 
tear. They stood waving their hands and 
smiling until the train was out of sight. I 
turned in disgust to walk away when a 
woman near me fainted, and I caught her 
as she fell. Then a low moan went up all 
over that station platform. It was as if 
those mothers moaned as one. There was 
no hysteria, just a low moan that swept 
over them. I saw dozens of them sink to 
the floor unconscious. They had kept their 
grief to themselves until their lads had 
gone. They had sent their boys away with 
a smile, and had kept their heartache 
buried until those lads had departed." 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 115 

I think that this is characteristic of the 
triumphant motherhood of the whole world. 
It is a Silhouette of Sorrow, but it has a 
background of the golden glory of bravery 
which is the admiration of all the world. 
A recent despatch says that a woman, an 
American, sent her boy away smiling a 
few weeks ago, and then dropped dead on 
the station, dead of grief. 

One who has lived and worked in France 
has silhouette memories of funeral proces- 
sions standing out in sombre blackness 
against a lurid nation. He has memories 
of funeral trains in little villages and in 
great cities; he has memories of brave men 
standing as doorkeepers in hotels, with 
arms gone, with crosses for bravery on 
their breasts, but somehow the cloud of 
sorrow is always fringed with gold and sil- 
ver. He has memories of funeral services in 
Notre Dame and the Madeleine, and in lit- 
tle towns all over France, but in and 
around them all there is somewhere the 



116 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

glory of sunlight, of hope, of courage. In- 
deed, one cannot have silhouettes, even of 
sorrow, if there is no background of light 
and hope. 

For we know that even in war-time God 
"still makes roses," as John Oxenham, the 
English poet, tells us: 

"Man proposes — God disposes; 
Yet our hope in Him reposes 
Who in war-time still makes roses." 

John Oxenham, one of the outstanding 
poets of the war, wrote this verse, and for 
me it has been a sort of a motto of faith 
during my service in France. I have quoted 
it everywhere I have spoken, and it has 
sung its way into my heart, like a benedic- 
tion with its comfort and its assurance. 

It has been surprising, too, the way the 
boys have grasped at it. I have quoted it 
to them privately, in groups, and in great 
crowds down on the line, and back in the 
rest-camps, and in the ports, and every- 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 117 

where I have quoted it I have had many- 
requests to give copies of it to the boys. I 
quoted it once in a negro hut, hesitating 
before I did so lest they should not appre- 
ciate it enough to make quoting it excus- 
able. But I took a chance. 

When the service was over a long line 
of intelligent-looking negro boys waited 
for me. I thought that they just wanted to 
shake hands, but much to my astonish- 
ment most of them wanted to know if 
I would give them a copy of that verse, 
and so I was kept busy for half an hour 
writing off copies of that brief word of 
faith. 

One never quite knows all that this verse 
means until he has been in France and has 
seen the suffering, the heartache, the lone- 
liness, the mud, and dirt and hurt; the 
wounds and pain and death which are 
everywhere. 

Then he turns from all the suffering to 
find a blood-red poppy blooming in the field 



118 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

behind him; or a million of them covering 
a green field like a great blanket. These 
poppies are exactly like our golden Cali- 
fornia poppies. Like them they grow in the 
fields and along the hedges; even covering 
the unsightly railroad-tracks, as if they 
would hide the ugly things of life. 

I thought to myself: "They look as if 
they had once been our golden California 
poppies, but that in these years of war 
every last one of them had been dipped in 
the blood of those brave lads who have 
died for us, and forever after shall they 
be crimson in memory of these who have 
given so much for humanity." 

One day in early June I was driving 
through Brittany along the coast of the 
Atlantic. On the road we passed many old- 
fashioned men, and women in their little 
white bonnets and their black dresses. 

We stopped at a beautiful little farm- 
house for lunch. It attracted us because of 
its serene appearance and its cleanliness. 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 119 

A gray-haired little old woman was in the 
yard when we stopped our machine. 

The yard was literally sprinkled with 
blood-red poppies. As we walked in and 
were making known our desire for lunch a 
beautiful girl of about twenty -five, dressed 
in mourning, stepped to the doorway, her 
black eyes flashing a welcome, and cried out : 
"Welcome, comrade Americaine." Behind 
her was a little girl, her very image. 

I guessed at once that in this quiet Brit- 
tany home the war had reached out its dev- 
astating hand. I had remarked earlier in 
the day as we drove along: "It is all so 
quiet and beautiful here, with the old-gold 
broom flowering everywhere on hedge and 
hill, and with the crimson poppies blowing 
in the wind, that it doesn't seem as if war 
had touched Brittany." 

A friend who knew better said: "But 
have you not noticed that women are pull- 
ing the carts, women are tilling the fields? 
Look at that woman over there pulling a 



120 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

plough. Have you not noticed that there 
are no men but old men everywhere ? " 

He was right. I could not remember to 
have seen any young men, and everywhere 
women were working in the field, and in 
one place a woman was yoked up with an 
ox, ploughing, while a young girl drove the 
odd pair. 

"And if that isn't enough, wait until we 
come to the next cathedral and I'll show 
you what corresponds to our * Honor Rolls' 
in the churches back home. Then you'll 
know whether war has touched Brittany 
or not." 

We entered with reverent hearts the next 
ancient cathedral of Brittany, in a little 
town with a population of only about two 
thousand, we were told, and yet out of this 
town close to five hundred boys had been 
killed in the Great War. Their names were 
posted, written with many a flourish by 
some village penman. In the list I saw the 
names of four brothers who had been killed, 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 121 

and their father. The entire family had been 
wiped out, all but the women. 

So I was mistaken. As quiet and peace- 
ful as Brittany was during May and June, 
as beautiful with broom and poppies as 
were its fields, it had not gone untouched 
by the cruel hand of war. It, too, had suf- 
fered, as has every hamlet, village, and 
corner of fair France; suffered grievously. 

Thus I was not surprised to hear that 
this beautiful young woman was wearing 
black because her husband had been killed, 
and that the little girl behind her in the 
doorway had no longer any hope that her 
soldier daddy would some day come home 
and romp with her as of old. At the lunch 
we were told all about it. True, there were 
tears shed in the telling, and these not 
alone by these brave Frenchwomen and 
the little girl, but it was a sweet, simple 
story of courage. Several times during its 
telling the little girl ran over to kiss the 
tears out of her mother's eyes, and to say, 



122 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

with such faith that it thrilled us: "Never 
mind, mother, the Americains are here 
now; they will kill the cruel Bodies." 

After dinner we walked amid the red 
poppies in the great lawn that was the 
crowning feature of that white-stone home. 
On the walls of the ancient house grew the 
most wonderful roses that I have ever seen 
anywhere, not excepting California. Great 
white roses, so large and fragrant that they 
seemed unreal, delicately moulded red roses, 
which unfolded like a baby's lips, climbed 
those ancient stone walls. The younger 
woman cared for them herself, and was 
engaged in that task of love even before 
we went away. 

I said to her, in what French I could 
command: "They are the most beautiful 
roses I have ever seen." 

"Even in your own beautiful America?" 
she asked with a smile. 

"Yes, more beautiful even than in my 
own America." 

"Yes," she said, "they are most beauti- 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 123 

ful, but they are more than that; they are 
full of hope for me. They are my promise 
that I shall see him some time again. They 
come back each spring. He loved them and 
cared for them when he was alive. Even on 
his leave in 1915 he gloried in them. And 
when they come back each spring they 
seem to come to give me promise that I 
shall see him again." 

Then I translated Oxenham's verses about 
the roses for her. The translation was poor, 
but she caught the idea, and her face beamed 
with a new light, and she said: "Ah, yes, it 
is as I believe, that the good God who still 
makes the beautiful roses, he will not take 
him away from me forever." 

I never read Oxenham's verse now that 
I do not see that little cottage in Brittany 
that has sheltered the same family for cen- 
turies; twined about with great red and 
white roses; and the old mother and the 
young mother and the little lonely girl. 

"Yet our hope in Him reposes 
Who in war-time still makes roses." 



124 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

Another time, down on the Toul front 
lines, I had this thought forced home by a 
strange scene. It was in mid-March and 
for three days a heavy blizzard had been 
blowing. I, who had lived in California for 
several years, wondered at this blizzard and 
revelled in it, although I had had to drive 
amid its fury, sometimes creeping along at 
a snail's pace, without lights, down near 
the front lines. It was cruelly cold and hard 
for those of us who were in the "truck 
gang." 

One night during this blizzard, which 
blew with such fury as I have never seen 
before, we were lost. At one time we were 
headed directly for the German lines, which 
were close, but an American sentry stopped 
us before we had gone very far, demanding 
in stern tones: "Where are youse guys goin' 
that direction?" 

I replied: "To Toul." 

"To Toul ! You're going straight toward 
the Boche lines. Turn around. You're the 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 125 

third truck that's got lost in this blizzard. 
Back that opposite way is your direction." 

The morning after it had cleared it was 
worth all the discomfort to see the hills 
and fields of France. One group of hills 
which I had heard were the most heavily 
fortified in all France, loomed like two 
huge sentinels before the city. The Ger- 
mans knew this also, and military experts 
say that that is the reason why they did 
not try to reach Paris by this route in the 
beginning of the war. 
We were never permitted on these hills, 
but we had seen them belch fire many a 
time as the German airplanes came over 
the city. 

But on this morning, after three days of 
snow, those great black hills were trans- 
formed, covered with a pure white blanket. 
The trees were robed in white. Not a spot 
of black appeared. Even the great guns on 
the top of the hill looked like white fingers 
pointing toward Berlin. The roads and 



126 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

fields and hills of France had suddenly been 
transformed as by a magic wand into things 
beautiful and white. 

War is black. War is muddy. War is 
bloody. War is gray. War is full of hate 
and hurt and wounds and blood and death 
and heartache and heartbreak and home- 
sickness and loneliness. 

Thomas Tiplady, in "The Cross at the 
Front," was right when he described war 
as symbolized by the great black cloud of 
smoke that unrolled in the sky when a 
great Jack Johnson had exploded. Every- 
thing that war touches it makes ugly, ex- 
cept the soul, and it cannot blacken that. 

It ruins the fields and makes them torn 
and cut; it tears the trees into ragged 
stumps. It kills the grass and tramples it 
underfoot. It takes the most beautiful 
architecture in the world and makes a pile 
of dust and dirt of it. It takes a beautiful 
face and makes it horrible with the scars 
of bayonet and burning gases. 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 127 

But on this morning God seemed to be 
covering up all of that ugliness and dirt and 
mud and blackness. Fields that the day 
before had been nothing but ugly blotches 
were white and beautiful. Ammunition 
dumps, horrible in their suggestion of death, 
seemed now to have been covered over and 
hidden by some kindly hand of love. The 
great brown-bronzed hills, the fortifica- 
tions filled with death and horror were 
gleaming white in the morning sunlight. 

I said to the other driver: "Well, it's too 
beautiful to be true, isn't it? It's a shame 
to think that when we get back from the 
front it will all be gone, melted, and the 
old mud and dirt will be back again." 

"Yes, but it means something to me," he 
said. 

"What does it mean?" 

"It means the future." 

"What are you talking about, man?" 

"Why, it means that some day this land 
will be beautiful again. It means that, im- 



128 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

possible as that idea seems, the war will 
cease, that people will till these fields 
again, that grass will grow, that flowers 
will bloom in these fields again, that people 
will come back to their homes in peace. It 
is symbolical of that great white peace that 
will come forever, when the ugly thing we 
call war will be buried so deeply underneath 
the white blanket of peace and brotherhood 
that the world will know war no more. It's 
like a rainbow to me. It is a promise. " 

I had never heard Tom grow so eloquent 
before, and what he said sounded Christian. 
It sounded like man's talk to me. It was 
the dream of the Christ I knew. It was the 
dream of the prophets of old. It was Ten- 
nyson's dream. Such a dream will not die 
from the earth, and men will just keep on 
dreaming it until some day it will come 
true, for — 

"Man proposes — God disposes; 
Yet my hope in Him reposes, 
Who in war-time still makes roses." 



SILHOUETTES OF SORROW 129 

The white and crimson roses of that 
little cottage in Brittany, the quiet and 
peace and promise and vision of a Jeanne 
d'Arc in the village of Domremy ; the bloom- 
ing of a billion red poppies in the fields of 
France; the blanketing of the earth with 
a covering of white snow sufficient to hide 
the ugliness of war, even for a day, all give 
promise of the God who, in the end, when 
he has given man every chance to redeem 
himself, and who, even amid cruel wars 
"still makes roses," will finally bring to 
pass "peace on earth; good-will to men." 

"Somewhere in France" 



IX 

SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 

ALL night long a group of Red Cross 
■* *- and Y. M. C. A. men and women 
had been feeding the refugees from Amiens. 
There were two thousand of them in one 
basement room of the Gare du Nord. They 
had not eaten for forty-eight hours. Most 
of them were little children, old men, and 
women of all ages. 

Two hundred or more of them had been 
in the hands of the Germans for two years, 
and when a few days before it came time 
for the Germans to open their second big 
Somme drive, they had driven these women 
and little girls out ahead of them, saying: 
"Go back to the French now, we do not 
want you any longer." 

For two days and nights these refugees 
had tramped the roads of France without 
food, many of them carrying little babies 

130 






SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 131 

in their arms, all of them weary and sick 
near unto death. 

The little children gripped your heart. 
As you handed them food and saw their 
little claw-like hands clutch at it, and as you 
saw them devour it like starved animals, 
the while clutching at a dirty but much- 
loved doll, somehow you could not see for 
the mists in your eyes as you walked up 
and down the narrow aisles of that crowded 
basement pouring out chocolate and hand- 
ing out food. The things you saw every 
minute in that room hung a veil over your 
eyes, and you were afraid all the while 
that in your blinding of tears you would 
step on some sleeping, starving child, who 
was lying on the cold floor in utter exhaus- 
tion, regardless of food. 

One woman especially attracted me. I 
noticed her time and time again as I walked 
past her with food. She was lying on her 
back on the floor, with nothing under her, 
her arms thrown back over her head, a 



132 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

child in her arms, or rather, lying against 
her breast asleep. She looked like an edu- 
cated, cultured woman. Her features were 
beautiful, but she looked as if she had 
passed through death and hell in suffering. 
I asked her several times as I passed by if 
she wouldn't have some food, and each 
time she gave some to her baby but took 
none herself. She could hardly lift her body 
from the stone basement to feed the child, 
and feeling that the thing that she needed 
most herself was food, I urged her to eat, 
but she would not. 

Finally I stopped before her and asked 
her if she was ill. She looked up into my face 
and said: "Tres fatiguee, monsieur! Tres 
fatiguee, monsieur!" (Very weary, sir! 
Very weary, sir !) 

By morning she was rested and accepted 
food. Then she told me her story. Two days 
before in her village they had been ordered 
by the army to leave their homes in a half- 
hour; everybody must be gone by that 



SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 133 

time; the Germans were coming, and there 
was no time to lose. She had hastily gath- 
ered some clothes together. The baby was 
lying in its crib. Her other child, a little 
six-year-old girl, had gone out into the 
front of the home watching for the truck 
that was to gather up the village people. 
A bomb fell from a German Gotha and 
killed this child outright, horribly mangling 
her body. This suffering mother just had 
time to pick the little mangled body up 
and lay it on a bed, kiss its cheeks good-by 
and leave it there, for there was no other 
way. She did not even have the satisfaction 
of burying her child. 

"Very weary! Very weary!" I can hear 
her words yet: "Tres fatiguee! Tres fa- 
tiguee!" No wonder you were fatigued, 
mother heart. You had a right to be, weary 
unto death. No wonder you did not care 
to eat all that long horrible night in the 
Gare du Nord. 

Loneliness is naturally one of the things 



134 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

with which our own boys suffer most. When 
one remembers that these Americans of 
ours are thousands of miles away from their 
homes, most of them boys who have never 
been away from home in their lives before; 
most of them boys who have never crossed 
the ocean before, they will judge fairly and 
understand better the loneliness of the 
American soldier. It is not a loneliness that 
will make him any the less a soldier. Ay, 
it is because of that very home love, and 
that very eagerness to get back to his home, 
that he will and does fight like a veteran 
to get it over. 

"Gosh! I wish I would find just one 
guy from Redding!" a seventeen-year-old 
boy said to me one night as I stood in a 
Y. M. C. A. hut. He was about the lone- 
liest boy I saw in France. I saw that he 
needed to smile. He was nothing but a 
kid, after all. 

"Gosh ! I wish I'd see just one guy from 
San Jose!" I said with a smile. Then we 



SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 135 

both laughed and sat down to some choc- 
olate, and had a good talk, the very thing 
that the lad was hungry for. 

He had been in France for nearly a year 
and he hadn't seen a single person he knew. 
He had been sick a good deal of the time 
and had just come from an appendix opera- 
tion. He was depressed in spirits, and his 
homesickness had poured itself out in that 
one phrase: "Gosh ! I wish I'd see just one 
guy from Redding !" 

Those who do not think that homesick- 
ness comes under the heading of "Suffering" 
had better look into the face of a truly 
homesick American boy in France before 
he judges. 

The English Tommy is only a few hours 
from home, and knows it. The French sol- 
dier is fighting on his own native soil, but 
the American is fighting three thousand 
miles away from home, and some of them 
seven thousand. 

"I haven't had a letter in five months 



136 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

from home," a boy in a hospital said to 
me. He was lonely and discouraged. And 
right here may I say to the American peo- 
ple that there is no one thing that needs 
more constant urging than the plea that 
you write, write, write to your soldier in 
France. He would rather have letters than 
candy, or cigarettes, or presents of any 
kind, as much as he loves some of these 
material things. I have put it to a vote 
dozens of times, and the result is always 
the same; ten to one they would rather 
have a letter from home than a package of 
cigarettes or a box of candy. I have seen 
boys literally suffering pangs that were a 
thousand times worse than wounds be- 
cause they did not receive letters from those 
at home. 

"Hell ! Nobody back there cares a damn 
about me ! I haven't received a letter in 
five months ! " a boy burst out in my pres- 
ence in Nancy one night. 

"Have you no mother or sister?" 



SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 137 

"Yes, but they're careless; they always 
were about let ter-wri ting." 

I tried to fix up excuses for them, but it 
tested both my imagination and my en- 
thusiasm to do it. I could put no real heart 
into making excuses for them, and so my 
words fell like lame birds to the ground, 
and the tragedy of it was that both of us 
knew there was no good excuse. It was the 
most pitiable case I saw in France. God 
pity the careless mother or sister or father 
or friend who isn't willing to take the time 
and make the sacrifice that is needed to at 
least supply a letter three times a week to 
the lad who is willing to sacrifice his all, if 
need be, that those at home may live in 
peace, free from the horror of the Hun. 

"Less Sweaters 
And More Letters" 

might very well be the motto of the folks 
here at home, for the boys would profit 
more in the long run, both in their bodies 



138 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

and in their souls. A censor friend of mine 
said to me one day: "If you ever get a 
chance when you go home to urge the people 
of America to write, and write, and write 
to their boys, do it with all your heart. 
You could do no better service to the boys 
than that." 

"What makes you feel so keenly about 
it?" I asked him, for he talked so earnestly 
that it surprised me. Ordinarily you think 
of the censor as utterly devoid of humani- 
tarian impulses, just a sort of a machine 
to slice out the really interesting things in 
your letters, a great human blue pencil, 
or a great human pair of scissors. But here 
was a censor that felt deeply what he was 
saying. 

"I'll tell you," he replied, "it is because 
some of the letters that I read which are 
going back home from lonely boys, begging 
somebody to write to them; literally beg- 
ging somebody, anybody, to write ! It gets 
my goat ! I can't stand it. I often feel like 



SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 139 

adding a sentence to some letters myself 
going home, telling them they ought to be 
ashamed the way they treat their boys 
about letter-writing; but the rules are so 
stringent that I must neither add to nor 
take from a letter save in the line of my 
duties. I'd like to tell a few of the people 
back home what I think of them, and I'd 
like for them to read some of the heart- 
aches that I read in the letters of the boys. 
Then they'd understand how I feel about 
it." 

I shall never forget my friend the wrestler 
when I asked how it was that he kept so 
clean, and he replied: "The letters help a 
lot." 

I have seen boys suffering from wounds 
of every description. I have seen them lying 
in hospitals with broken backs. I have seen 
them with blinded eyes. I have seen them 
with legs gone, and arms. I have seen 
them when the doctors were dressing their 
wounds. I remember one captain who had 



140 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

fifty wounds in his back, and he had them 
dressed without a single cry. I have seen 
them gassed, and I have seen them shot 
to pieces with shell shock, and yet the 
worst suffering I have seen in France has 
been on the part of boys whose folks back 
home have neglected them; boys who, day 
after day, had seen the other fellows get 
their letters regularly, boys who had gone 
with hope in their hearts time after time 
for letters, and then had lost hope. This is 
real suffering, suffering that does more to 
knock the morale out of a lad than any- 
thing that I know in France. 

Silhouettes of Suffering stand out in my 
memory with great vividness. One general 
cause of suffering in addition to the above 
is loneliness in the heart of the young hus- 
band and father, who has a wife and kiddie 
back home. 

I remember one young officer that I saw 
in a Paris hotel. He had been out in the 
Vosges Mountains with a company of 



SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 141 

wood-choppers for six months. He had 
come in for his first leave. His leave lasted 
eight days. Instead of going to the theatres 
he sat around in our officers' hotel lobby 
and watched the women walking about, 
the Y. M. C. A. girls who were the hostesses 
there. They noticed him as he sat there all 
evening, hardly moving. After several nights 
one of the men secretaries went up to him 
and said: "Why don't you go over and 
talk with them? They would be glad to 
talk with you." 

"Oh," he said, "I never was much for 
women at home, except my wife and kid. 
I never did know how to talk to women. 
Especially now, for I've been up in the 
woods for six months. Just let me sit 
here and look at 'em. That's enough for 
me. Just let me sit here and look at 
'em!" 

And that was the way he spent his leave, 
just loafing around in that hotel lobby 
watching the women at their work. 



142 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

"This has been the loneliest day of my 
life," a major said to me on Mother Day 
in a great port of entry. 

"Why, major?" 

Then he reached into his pocket and 
pulled out the picture of a seven-year-old 
boy and that boy's mother. 

Suffering ? Yes, of course I have seen boys 
wounded, as I have said, but for real down- 
right suffering, loneliness is worst, and it 
lies entirely within the province of the 
folks at home to alleviate this suffering. I 
have seen a boy morose and surly, dis- 
couraged and grouchy in the morning. He 
didn't know what was the matter with 
himself. In the afternoon I have seen him 
laughing and yelling like a wild animal at 
play, happy as a lark. 

What was the difference ? He had gotten 
a letter. 

Then there is the Silhouette of Physical 
Suffering. Hundreds of these sombre sil- 
houettes stand out against a lurid back- 



SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 143 

ground of fire and blood. One only I quote 
because it has a fringe of hope. 

The boy's back was broken. It had been 
broken by a shell concussion. There were no 
visible signs of a wound on his body any- 
where, the doctors told me in the hospital. 
He did not know it as yet. He thought it 
was his leg that was hurt. They asked me to 
tell him, as gently as I could. It was a 
hard task to give a man. 

He was lying on a raised bed so that, 
when I went up to it, it came up to my 
neck almost, and when I talked with the 
lad I could look straight into his eyes. 
Those eyes I shall never forget, they were 
so fearless, so brave, and yet so full of 
weariness and suffering. 

I took his hand and said: "Boy, I am a 
preacher." For once I didn't say anything 
about being a secretary. I just told him I 
was a preacher. 

He said: "I am so glad you have come. 
I just wanted to see a real, honest-to- 



144 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

goodness preacher." He forced a smile to 
accompany this sentence. 

"Well, I'm all of that, and proud of it," 
I replied, smiling back into his brave 
eyes. 

"I'm so tired. I try to be brave, but I've 
been lying here for three months now, and 
my leg doesn't seem to get any better. It 
pains all the time until I think I'll die with 
the agony of it. I never sleep only when 
they give me something. But I try hard to 
be brave." 

"You are brave!" I said to him. "They 
all tell me that, the doctors and nurses." 

"They are so good to me," he said in 
low tones so that I had to bend to hear 
them. "But my leg; they don't seem to be 
able to help me." 

Then I told him as gently as I could that 
it was not his leg, that it was his back, and 
that he would likely not get well. Then I 
tried to tell him of the room in his Father's 
house that was ready for him when he was 



SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING 145 

ready to accept it, and of what a glorious 
welcome there was there. 

He reached out for my hand in the semi- 
darkness of that evening. I can feel his 
hand-clasp yet. I didn't know what to say, 
but a phrase that had lingered in my mind 
from an old story came to the rescue. 

"Don't you want the Christ to help you 
bear your pain ? " I asked him. 

"That is just what I do want," he said 
simply. "That was why I was so glad you 
came — an honest-to-goodness preacher," 
and he smiled again, so bravely, in spite of 
his suffering, and in spite of the news that 
I had just broken to him. 

Then we prayed. I stood beside his bed 
holding his hand and praying. The room 
was full of other wounded boys, but in the 
twilight I doubt if a lad there knew what 
we were doing. I spoke low, just so he could 
hear, and the Master knew what was in 
my heart without hearing. 

When I was through I felt a pressure of 



146 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

his hand, and he said: "Now I feel stronger. 
He is helping me bear my burden. Thank 
you for coming, and" — then he paused 
for words "and — thank you for bringing 
Him." 

Yes, there is suffering in France, suffer- 
ing among our soldiers, too, but suffering 
that is glorified by courage. 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

ONE night down near the front lines 
as we drove the great truck slowly 
over the icy roads, on the top of a little 
knoll stood a lone sentinel against a back- 
ground of snow, and that is a silhouette 
that I shall never forget. 

Another night there was a beautiful after- 
glow, and being a lover of the beautiful as 
well as a driver of a truck, I was lost in the 
wonder of the crimson flush against the 
western hills. 

"Makes me homesick," said the big man 
beside me, whose home is in the West. 
"Looks for all the world like one of our 
Arizona afterglows." 

"It is beautiful," I replied, and then we 
were both lost in silent appreciation of the 
scene before us, when suddenly we were 
startled witless. 

147 



148 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

"Halt!" rang out through the semi- 
darkness. "Who goes there?" 

"Y. M. C. A." we shot back as quick as 
lightning, for we had learned that it doesn't 
pay to waste time in answering a sentinel's 
challenge down within sound of the Ger- 
man guns. 

"Pass on, friends," was the grinning 
reply. That rascal of a sentry had caught 
us unawares, lost in the afterglow, and he 
was tickled over having startled us into 
astonishment. 

But even though he did give us a scare, 
I am sure that the picture of him standing 
there in the middle of that French road, 
with his gun raised against the afterglow, 
will be one of the outstanding silhouettes 
of the memories of France. 

Then there was the old Scotch dominie 
down at Chateau-Thierry, with the marines. 
The boys called him "Doc," and loved him, 
for he had been with them for eight months. 

One night, in the midst of the hottest 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 149 

fighting in June, the old secretary thought 
he would go out in the night and see how 
the boys were getting along. He walked 
cautiously along the edge of the woods 
when suddenly the word "Halt!" shot 
out in low but distinct tones. 

"Who goes there?" 

"A friend," the secretary replied. 

"Oh, it's you, is it, Doc? Gee, I'm glad 
to see you ! This is a darned weird place 
to-night. Every time the wind blows I 
think it's a Boche." 

There was a slight noise out in No Man's 
Land. "What's that, Doc, a Boche?" 

"I think not." 

"You can't tell, Doc; they're everywhere. 
If I've seen one, I've seen ten thousand 
to-night on this watch." 

That old gray-haired secretary will never 
forget that night when he walked among 
the men in the trenches with his little gifts 
and his word of cheer, that memorable 
night before the Americans made them- 



150 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

selves heroes forever in the Bois du Belleau. 
He will never forget the sound of that boy 
sentry's voice when he said, "Gee, Doc, 
I'm glad it's you"; nor will he forget the 
looks of the boy as he stood there in the 
darkness, the guardian of America's hopes 
and homes, nor will he forget the firm, warm 
clasp of the lad's hands as he walked away 
to greet others of his comrades. 

These are Soldier Silhouettes that re- 
main vivid until time dies, until the "springs 
of the seas run dust," as Markham says: 

"Forget it not 'til the crowns are crumbled; 

'Til the swords of the Kings are rent with rust; 
Forget it not 'til the hills lie humbled; 
And the springs of the seas run dust." 

No, we do not forget scenes and moments 
like these in our lives. 

Then there is the silhouette of the pro- 
file of the captain of a certain American 
machine-gun company who, in March, 
marched with his men into the Somme line. 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 151 

He was an old football-player back in the 
States, and we were having a last dinner 
together in Paris, a group of college men. 
After dinner, when we had finished dis- 
cussing the dangers of the coming weeks, 
and he had told us that his major had said 
to him, "If fifteen per cent of us come out 
alive, I shall be glad," and after we had 
drifted back to the old college days, and 
home and babies, and after he had shown 
us a picture of his wife and his kiddies, it 
became strangely quiet in the room, and 
suddenly he turned his face from us, with 
just the profile showing against the light 
of the window, and exclaimed: "My God, 
fellows, for a half-hour you have made me 
forget that there is a war, and I have been 
back on the old campus again playing foot- 
ball, and back with my babies." 

Then his jaw set, and I shall never forget 
the profile of his face as that set look came 
back and once again he became the captain 
of a machine-gun company. 



152 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

Then there was the lone church service 
that my friend Clarke held one evening at 
a crossroads of France. He had held seven 
services that Sunday, one in a machine- 
gun company's dugout, with six men; an- 
other with a group of a dozen men in a 
front-line trench; another with several offi- 
cers in an officers' dugout; another with a 
battery outfit who were "On Call," ex- 
pecting orders to send over a few shells; 
another with several men out in No Man's 
Land, on the sunny side of an old upturned 
mass of tree roots; one in a listening-post, 
and finally this service with a lone sentry 
at a crossroads. 

"But how did you do it?" I asked. 

"I just saw him there," Clarke replied, 
"and he looked lonely, and I walked up 
and said: 'How'd you like to have me read 
a little out of the Book?' 

'"Fine!' he said. 

"Then I prayed with him, standing there 
at the crossroads, and I asked him if he 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 153 

didn't want to pray. He was a church boy 
back home, and he prayed as fine a prayer 
as ever I heard. Then we sang a hymn to- 
gether. It was 'Jesus, Lover of My Soul/ 
and neither of us can sing much, but as I 
look back on it, it was the sweetest music 
that I ever had a part in making. The only 
thing I didn't do was take up a collection. 
Outside of that, it was just as if we had 
gone through a regular church service at 
home. I even preached a little to him. No, 
not just preached, but talked to him about 
the Master." 

"Did you even go so far with your lone 
one-man congregation as to have a bene- 
diction?" I asked him. 

"No, I just said what was in my heart 
when we were through, 'God bless and 
keep you, boy,' and went on." 

"I never heard a finer benediction than 
that, old man," I replied with feeling. 

And the silhouette of that one Y. M. C. A. 
secretary holding a religious service with 



154 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

a lone sentry of a Sunday evening, bring- 
ing back to the lad's memory sacred 
things of home and church and the Christ, 
giving him a new hold on the bigger, better 
things, bringing the Christ out to him there 
on that road, that silhouette is mine to 
keep forever close to my heart. I shall 
see that and shall smile in my soul over 
it when eternity calls, and shall thank 
God for its sweetening influence in my 
life. 

And so this comfort may come to the 
mothers and fathers of America, that 
through the various agencies of the Ameri- 
can army, through General Pershing's in- 
tense interest in righteous things, through 
that Lincoln-like Christian leader of the 
chaplains, Bishop Brent, through the 
Y. M. C. A., and the Salvation Army, and 
the Knights of Columbus, your boy has 
his chance, whatever creed, or race, or 
church, to worship his God as he wishes; 
and not one misses this opportunity, even 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 155 

the lonely sentinel on the road. And the 
glorious thing about it is that boys who 
never before thought of going to church at 
home, crowd the huts on Sundays and for 
the good-night prayers on week-days. 

Just before the battle of Chateau-Thierry, 
"Doc/* of whom I have spoken in this 
chapter before, said: "Boys, do you want 
a communion service?" 

"Yes," they shouted. 

Knowing that there were Catholics and 
Jews and Protestants and non-believers 
there, he said: "Now, anybody who doesn't 
want to take communion may leave." 

Not a single man left. Out of one hundred 
or more men only two did not kneel to 
take of the sacred bread and wine. Two 
Jews knelt with the others, several Roman 
Catholics, and men of all Protestant de- 
nominations. Half of them were dead before 
another sunrise came around, but they had 
had their service. 

Every man has his opportunity to wor- 



156 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

ship God in his own way and as nearly as 
possible at his own altars in France. There 
was the story of "The Rosary." 

It was Hospital Hut Number , and 

half a thousand boys from the front, 
wounded in every conceivable way, were 
sitting there in the hut in a Sunday -evening 
service. Many of them had crutches be- 
side them; others canes. Some of them had 
their heads bandaged; others of them car- 
ried their arms in slings. Some of them had 
lost legs, and some of them had no arms 
left. Their eager faces were lighted with a 
strange light, such as is not seen on land 
or sea, and on most of those faces, un- 
ashamed, ran over pale cheeks the tears 
of homesickness as the young corporal 
whom I had taken with me from another 
town sang "The Rosary." I have never 
heard it sung with more tenderness, nor 
have I heard it sung in more beautiful 
voice. That young lad was singing his 
heart out to those other boys. He had not 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 157 

been up front himself as yet, for he was in 
a base port attending to his duties, which 
were just as important as those up front, 
but it was hard for him to see it that way. 
So he loved and respected these other lads 
who had, to his way of thinking, been 
more fortunate than he, because they had 
seen actual fighting. He respected them 
because of their wounds, and he wanted to 
help them. So he lifted that rich, sweet, 
sympathetic tenor voice until the great 
hut rang with the old, old song, and hearts 
were melted everywhere. I saw, back in the 
audience, a group of nurses with bowed 
heads. They knew what the rosary meant 
to those who suffer and die in the Catholic 
faith. They, too, had memories of that 
beautiful song. A group of officers, includ- 
ing a major, all wounded, listened with 
heads bowed. 

As I sat on the crude stage and saw the 
effects of his magical voice on this crowd 
I got to thinking of what this war is mean- 



158 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

ing to that fine understanding of those 
who count the beads of the rosary and 
those who do not. I had seen so many 
examples of fine fraternal fellowship be- 
tween Catholic and Protestant that I felt 
that I ought to put it down in some per- 
manent form. 

There is a true story of one of our 
Y. M. C. A. secretaries who was called to 
the bedside of a dying Catholic boy. There 
was no priest available, and the boy wanted 
a rosary so badly. In his half-delirium he 
begged for a rosary. This young Protestant 
Y. M. C. A. secretary started out for a 
French village, five miles away, on foot, to 
try to find a rosary for this sick Catholic 
boy, and after several hours' search he 
found a peasant woman whom he made 
understand the emergency of the situation, 
and he got the loan of the rosary and took 
it back through five miles of mud to the 
bedside of that Catholic lad, and comforted 
him with the feel of it in his fevered hands 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 159 

and the hope of it in his fevered soul. When 
I heard this story it stirred me to the very 
fountain depths, but I have seen so much 
of this fine spirit of service in the Y. M. C. A. 
since then that I have come to know that 
as far as the Y. M. C. A. is concerned all 
barriers of church narrowness are entirely 
swept away. 

I have had most delightful comradeship 
since I have been in France in one great 
area as religious director with two Knights 
of Columbus secretaries and one father — 
Chaplain Davis — all of whom say freely 
and eagerly: "We have never had anything 
but the finest spirit of co-operation and 
friendship from the Y. M. C. A." 

"Why," added Chaplain Davis, a Catho- 
lic priest, "why, the first Sunday I was 
here, when I had no place to take my boys 
for mass, a secretary came to me and 
offered me the hut. It has always been that 
way." 

The story of the French priest who con- 



160 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

fessed a dying Catholic boy through a 
Y. M. C. A. Protestant secretary inter- 
preter, in a Y. M. C. A. hut, has been told 
far and wide, but it is only illustrative of 
the broadening lines of Catholicism and 
the wider fraternal relations of all pro- 
fessed Christians. 

The marvellous story that my friend, the 
French chaplain, tells of being marooned 
in a shell-hole at Verdun for several days 
with a Catholic priest, and of their discus- 
sion of religion and life there under shell- 
fire, and the tenderness with which the 
Catholic priest kissed the hand of the 
Protestant French chaplain when the two 
had agreed that, after all, there was one 
common God for a common, suffering na- 
tion of people, and that this war would 
break all church barriers down, and that 
out of it would come a new spirit in the 
Catholic church, a new brotherhood for 
all. That was an impressive indication of 
the thing that is sweeping France to-day 



SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 161 

in church circles, and that will sweep 
America after the war. 

Then there is that other story of the 
Catholic priest who had been in the same 
regiment with a French Protestant chap- 
lain, each of whom deeply respected the 
other because of the unflinching bravery 
that each had displayed under intense shell- 
fire, and of the great love that each had 
seen the other show in two years of con- 
stant warfare in the same regiment. Then 
came that terrible morning at Verdun, when 
the French Protestant chaplain, the friend 
of the Catholic priest, had been killed while 
trying to bring in a wounded Catholic boy 
from No Man's Land. On the day of this 
Protestant chaplain's funeral the Catholic 
priest stood in God's Acre with bared head, 
and spoke as tender and as sincere a 
eulogy as ever a man spoke over the grave 
of a dear friend, spoke with the tears in 
his eyes most of the time. Church lines 
were forgotten here. It was a prophetic 



162 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

scene, this, where a Catholic priest spoke 
at the funeral of a Protestant chaplain. 
It was prophetic of that new church brother- 
hood that is to come after the war is over. 



XI 

SKY SILHOUETTES 

nr^HEY are the lights, the lights of war. 
■*■ Sometimes they are just the stars shin- 
ing out that makes the wounded soldier out 
in No Man's Land look up, in spite of shell- 
fire and thunder, in spite of wounds and 
death, in spite of loneliness and heartache, 
in spite of mud and rain, to exclaim, as 
Donald Hankey tells us in a most wonder- 
ful chapter of "A Student in Arms": "God ! 
God everywhere, and underneath are the 
everlasting arms ! " 

Sometimes the Sky Silhouettes number 
among their own just a moonlight night 
with a crescent moon sailing quietly and 
serenely over the horizon in the east, while 
great guns belch fire in the west, a fire 
that seems to shame the timid moon itself. 

Sometimes they are search-lights cleaving 
the sky over a great city like Paris, or along 

163 



164 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

the front lines, or gleaming from an air- 
ship. 

Sometimes they are signal-lights flashing 
out of the darkness from a patrolling plane 
overhead, or a blazing trail of fire as a pa- 
trol falls to its death in a battle by night. 

Sometimes they are signal-lights flash- 
ing from an observation balloon anchored 
in the darkness over the trenches to guard 
the troops from dangers in the air. 

Sometimes they are the flashes, the fleet, 
swallow-like flashes, of an enemy plane 
caught in the burning, blazing path of a 
search-light, and then hounded by it to its 
death. 

Sometimes they are signals flashed from 
the top of a cruiser on the high seas across 
the storm-tossed waters to a little destroyer, 
which flashes back its answer, and then in 
turn flashes a message of light to one of 
the convoying planes overhead in the dim 
dusk of early evening. 

Sometimes these Sky Silhouettes are the 



SKY SILHOUETTES 165 

range-finders that poise in the air for a 
few seconds, guiding the air patrols home, 
and sometimes they are just the varied, 
interesting, gleaming, flashing "Lights of 
War." 



o 



XII 

THE LIGHTS OF WAR 

NE'S introduction into the war zone 



and into war-zone cities and villages, 
and one's visits "down the line" to the 
front by night, will always be filled with 
the thrill of the unusual because of the 
Lights of War. Where lights used to be, 
there are no lights now, and where they 
were not seen before the war, they are 
radiant and rampant now. 

The first place that an American trav- 
eller notices this absence of lights is on the 
boat crossing over the Atlantic. From the 
first night out of New York the boats 
travel without a single light showing. 
Every light inside of the boat is covered 
with a heavy black crape, and the port- 
holes and windows are so scrupulously and 
carefully chained down that the average 

166 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 167 

open-air fiend from California or elsewhere 
feels that he will suffocate before morning 
comes, and even in the bitterest of winter 
weather I have known some fresh-air fiends 
to prefer the deck of the ship, with all of 
its bitter winds and cold, to the inside of a 
cabin with no windows open. I stood on 
the deck of an ocean liner "Somewhere on 
the Atlantic" a few months ago as the 
great ship was ploughing its zigzag course 
through the black waters, dodging sub- 
marines. There was not a star in the sky. 
There was not a fight on the boat. Abso- 
lutely the only lights that one saw was 
when he leaned over the railing and saw 
the splash of innumerable phosphorescent 
organisms breaking against the boat. I 
have seen the like of it only once before, 
and this was on the Pacific down at Asil- 
omar one evening, when the waves were 
running fire with phosphorescence. It was 
a beautiful sight there and on the Atlantic 
too. 



168 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

It Was Midnight 

On this particular night, as far as one 
could see, this brilliant organic light illu- 
minated the sea like the hands of my lumi- 
nous wrist-watch were made brilliant by 
phosphorescence. I noticed this and looked 
down at my watch to see what time it was. 
It was midnight. 

As I looked, my friend, who was stand- 
ing beside me on the deck, said: "The last 
order is that no wrist-watches that are 
luminous may be exposed on the decks at 
night. That order came along with the or- 
der forbidding smoking on the decks at 
night. The Germans can sight the light of 
a cigar a long distance through their peri- 
scopes." 

I smiled to myself, for it was my first 
introduction to the romantic part that 
lights and the lack o* lights is playing in 
this great World War. Then my friend con- 
tinued his observations as we stood there 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 169 

on the aft deck watching the white waves 
break, glorious with phosphorescence. He 
said: "What a topsyturvy world it is. 
Three years ago if a great ship like this 
had dared to cross the Atlantic without a 
single light showing, it would have horri- 
fied the entire world, and that ship captain 
would have been called to trial by every 
country that sails the seas. He would have 
been adjudged insane. But now every ship 
sails the seas with no navigation-lights 
showing." 

In War Country 

But when one gets his real introduction 
into the lights o' war is when he gets into 
the war country. It is eight o'clock in a 
great French city. This French city has 
been known the world over for its brilliant 
lights. It has been known for its gayly 
lighted boulevards, and indeed this might 
apply to one of three or four French cities. 
Light was the one scintillating character- 



170 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

istic of this great city. The first night that 
one finds himself here he feels as though 
he were wandering about in a country vil- 
lage at home. No arc-lights shine. The win- 
dow-lights are all extinguished. The few 
lights on the great boulevards are so dimmed 
that their luminosity is about that of a 
healthy firefly in June back home. One 
gropes his way about, feeling ahead of him 
and navigating cautiously, even the main 
boulevards. 

The first time I walked down the streets 
of this great city at night I had the same 
feeling that I had on the Atlantic. I was 
sailing without lights, on an unknown 
course, and I felt every minute that I would 
bump into some unseen human craft, as 
indeed I did, both a feminine craft and a 
male craft. I also had the feeling that in 
this particular city, in the darkness I 
might be submarined by a city human 
U-boat, which would slip up behind me. 
After having my second trip here I still 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 171 

have that feeling as I walk the streets; the 
unlighted streets of this city, and especially 
the side-streets, by night. 

French City During Raid 

But the one time when you catch the 
very heart and soul of the lights o' war is 
when you happen to drop into a French 
city while the Boches are making a raid 
overhead. I have had this experience in 
towns and villages and cities. At the signal 
of the siren the lights of the entire city 
suddenly snuff out, and the city or town 
or village is in total darkness. Candles may 
be lighted and are lighted, but on the whole 
one either walks the dark streets flashing 
his electric "Ever Ready," or huddled up 
in a subway or in a cellar, or in a hallway 
listening to the barrage of defense guns and 
to the bombs dropping, watches and listens 
and waits in total darkness, and while he 
waits he isn't certain half the time whether 
the noise he hears is the dropping of Ger- 



172 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

man bombs or the beating of his own heart. 
Both make entirely too much noise for 
peace and comfort. 

As one approaches the front-line cities 
and towns he learns something more about 
the lights o* war. It is dark. He is in a little 
town and must go to another town nearer 
the front lines. He is standing at the depot 
(gare). No lights are visible save here and 
there an absolutely necessary red or green 
light, which is veiled dimly. His train pulls 
silently in. There is not a single light on it 
from one end to the other. It creeps in like 
a great snake. There is nobody to tell you 
whether this is your train or not, but you 
take a chance and climb into a compart- 
ment which is pitch-dark. 

Hears American Voice 

You have a ticket that calls for first- 
class military compartment, but you 
climbed into the first open door you saw, 
and didn't know and didn't care whether 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 173 

it was first, second, third, or tenth class 
just so you got on your way. Your eyes 
soon became accustomed to the darkness 
and you discerned two or three forms in 
the seat opposite you. You wondered if 
they were French, Italians, Belgians, Eng- 
lish, Australians, Canadians, Moroccans, 
Algerians, or Americans. It was too dark 
to see, but suddenly you heard a familiar 
voice saying, "Gosh, I wish I was back in 
little ole New York," and you made a grab 
in the darkness for that lad's hand. 

All during your trip no trainman appears. 
You are left to your own sweet will at 
nights in the war zone when you are on a 
train. No stations are announced. You are 
supposed to have sense enough to know 
where you are going, and to have gumption 
enough to get off without either being as- 
sisted or told to do so. The assumption, I 
suppose, is that anybody who travels in 
the war zone knows where he is going. 
Personally, I felt like the American phrase, 



174 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

"I don't know where I'm going but I'm 
on the way," and I tried to jump off at 
two or three towns before I got to my own 
destination, but the American soldiers had 
been that way before on their way to the 
trenches, and wouldn't let me off at the 
wrong place. I thought surely that some- 
body would come along to take my ticket, 
but nobody appeared. I soon found that 
night trains "on the line" pay little atten- 
tion to such minor matters as tickets, and 
I have a pocketful that have never been 
taken up. Time after time I have piled into 
a train at night, after buying a ticket to 
my destination; have journeyed to my 
destination, have gone through the depot 
and to my hotel without ever seeing a train- 
man to take the ticket. I was let severely 
alone. And even if a conductor had come 
along through the train it would have been 
too dark for him to have seen me, and I 
am sure I could have dodged him had I 
so desired. Maybe that's the reason they 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 175 

don't take the tickets up. Anyhow, I have 
given you a picture of a great train in the 
war zone, winding its way toward the front, 
in complete darkness. 

Flash-Lights 

Flash-lights have come into their own in 
this war. One would as soon think of living 
without a flash-light as he would think of 
travelling without clothes in Greenland. 
It simply cannot be done. In any city, from 
Paris to the smallest towns on the front, 
one must have his flash-light. The streets of 
the cities and towns of France are a hun- 
dred times more crooked than those of 
Boston. If Boston's streets followed the 
cow-paths, the streets of the cities of France 
followed cows with the St. Vitus dance. 
Around these streets one had to find his 
way by night with a flash-light, especially 
during an air-raid. One must have a flash, 
too, for the houses and hotels when an air- 
raid is on, and one must have it when one 



176 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

is driving a big truck or an automobile down 
along the front lines, for no lights are per- 
mitted on any machines, official or other- 
wise, after a certain point is reached. One 
of the favorite outdoor sports of this 
preacher for a month was to He on his 
stomach on the front mud-guard of a big 
Pierce-Arrow through the war-zone roads, 
bumping over shell-holes, with a little 
pocket flash-light playing on the ground, 
searching out the shell-holes, and trying to 
help the driver keep in the road. It is a 
delightful occupation about two o'clock in 
the morning, with a blizzard blowing, and 
knowing that the big truck is rumbling 
along within sight and sound of the German 
big guns. Trucks make more noise on such 
occasions than a Twentieth Century Lim- 
ited. "No lights beyond divisional head- 
quarters" was the order, and night after 
night we travelled along these roads with 
only an occasional flash of the Ever Ready 
to guide. And so it is that the flash-light has 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 177 

come to its own, and every private soldier, 
officer, and citizen in France is equipped 
with one. He would be like a swordfish 
without its sword if he didn't have it. 

Ladder of Light 

Then suddenly you see a strange finger 
of light reaching into the sky. Or you may 
liken it to a ladder of light climbing the sky. 
Or you may liken it to a lance of light 
piercing the darkness. Or you may just call 
it a good, old-fashioned search-light, which it 
is. It is watching for Hun planes, and it plays 
all night long from north to south, from 
east to west, restlessly, eagerly, quickly, 
like a "hound of the heavens" guarding the 
earth. First it sweeps the horizon, and then 
it suddenly shoots straight up into the 
zenith like another sun, and it seems to 
flood the very skies. No German plane can 
cut through that path of light without 
being seen, and one night I had the rare 
privilege of seeing a plane caught by the 



178 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

search-light on its ever-vigilant patrol. It 
was a thrilling sight. One minute later the 
anti-aircraft guns were thundering away 
and the shrapnel was breaking in tiny 
patches around this plane while the search- 
lights played on both the plane and the 
shrapnel patches of smoke against the sky, 
making a wonderful picture. Military writ- 
ers say that the enemy planes are more 
afraid of these search-lights than of the 
guns. 

But perhaps the most thrilling sight of 
all is that dark night when one sees for the 
first time the star-shells along the horizon. 
At first you may see them ten miles away 
making luminous the earth. Then as you 
drive nearer and nearer, that far-off heat- 
lightning effect disappears and you can 
actually see the curve of the star-shells 
as they mount toward the skies over No 
Man's Land and fall again as gracefully 
as a fountain of water. Sometimes you will 
see them for miles along the front, making 




One night I had the privilege of seeing a plane caught by 
the search-light. 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 179 

night day and lighting up the fields and 
surrounding hills as though for a great 
celebration. 

Bursting Bombs 

The light of bursting shells as they fall, 
or of bursting bombs from an aeroplane, is 
a short, sharp, quick light like an electric 
flash when a wire falls or a flash of sharp 
lightning, but the light of the great guns 
along the line as they thunder their mis- 
siles of death can be seen for miles when a 
bombardment is on. One forgets the thun- 
der of these belching monsters, and one 
forgets the death they carry, in the glory 
of the flame of noonday light that they 
make in the night. 

Then there are the range-finders. These 
suddenly shoot up in the night, steady and 
clear, and remain for several minutes burn- 
ing brightly before they go out. I used to 
see these frequently driving home from the 
front. They were sent up from the hangars 



180 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

to guide the French and American planes 
to a safe landing by night. 

Then there is the moonlight. Moonlight 
nights in towns along the war front are 
dreaded, for it invariably means a Boche 
raid. Clear moonlight nights with a full 
moon are fine for lovers in a country that 
is at peace, but it may mean death for 
lovers in a country that is at war. But 
moonlight nights are beautiful even in war 
countries, with dim old cathedrals looming 
in the background, and the white villages 
of France, a huge chateau here and there 
against the hillside or crowning its summit; 
and the white roads and white fields of 
France swinging by. One forgets there is 
war then, until he hears the unmistakable 
beat of the Hun plane overhead and sees the 
flash of one, two, three, four, five, six, ten, 
twelve, fifteen bombs break in a single field 
a few hundred yards away, and the driver 
remarks: "I knew we'd have a raid to- 
night. It's a great night for the Boche !" 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 181 

Starlight at Front 

Then there is the starlight on No Man's 
Land, for the starlight is a part of the 
lights o' war just as are the moonlight and 
the star-shells and the little flash-lights 
and the range-finders and the bursting 
shells and bombs. But there are other more 
significant lights o' war. 

There is the "Light that Lies in the Sol- 
diers' Eyes," of which my friend Lynn 
Harold Hough has written so beautifully 
and understandingly. Only over here it is 
a different light. It is the light of a great 
loneliness for home, hidden back of a light 
that we see in the eyes of the three soldiers 
in the painting "The Spirit of Seventy- 
Six." It is there. It is here. One sees it in 
the eyes of the lads who have come in out 
of the trenches after they have had their 
baptism of fire. I have seen them come in 
after successfully repulsing a German raid 
and I have seen their eyes fairly luminous 



182 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

with victory, and that light says, as said 
the spirit of France, not only "They shall 
not pass," but it says something else. It 
says: "We'll go get 'em ! We'll go get 'em !" 
That's the light o' war that lies in the 
soldiers' eyes back of the light of home. I 
verily believe that the two are close akin. 
The American lad knows that the sooner 
we lick the Hun the sooner he'll get back 
home, where he wants to be more than he 
wants anything else on earth. 

Y. M. C. A.'s Light 

Then there's the light in the Y. M. C. A. 
hut, and from General Pershing down to 
the lowest private the army knows that 
this is the warmest, friendliest, most home- 
like, most welcome light that shines out 
through the darkness of war. It not only 
shines literally by night, but it shines by 
day. I have seen some huts back of the front 
lines lighted by the most brilliant electricity. 
Some of it is obtained from local power- 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 183 

plants, and some of it is made by the 
Y. M. C. A. Then I have seen some huts 
up near the lines that were lighted by old- 
fashioned oil-lamps. Then I have been in 
Y. M. C. A. dugouts and cellars and holes 
in the ground, up so close to the* German 
lines that they were shelled every day, and 
these have been lighted by tallow candles 
stuck in a bottle or in their own melted 
grease. I have seen huts back of the lines 
away from danger of air-raids that could 
have their windows wide open, and I have 
seen the light pouring in a flood out of 
these windows, a constant invitation to 
thousands of American boys. And again I 
have seen our huts in places so near the 
lines that the secretaries had not only tc 
use candles but to screen their windows 
with a double layer of black cloth, so that 
not a single ray of that tiny candle might 
throw its beams to the watching German 
on the hill beyond. I never knew before 
what Shakespeare meant when he said: 



184 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

"How far a tiny candle throws its beams." 
But whether it has been in the more pro- 
tected huts back of the lines or in the dan- 
gerous huts close to the lines, the lights in 
the huts are usually the only lights availa- 
ble for the boys, and to these lights they 
flock every night. It is a Rembrandt pic- 
ture that they make in the dim light of 
the candles sitting around the tables writ- 
ing letters by candle-light. It is their one 
warm, bright spot, for a great stove nearly 
always blazes away in the Y. M. C. A. hut, 
and it is the only warmth the lad knows. 
Few of the billets or tents in France boast 
of a stove. 

Two things I shall never forget. One was 
the sight of a Y. M. C. A. hut that I saw 
in a town far back of the trenches. It was 
in the town where General Pershing's head- 
quarters are located. On the very tip of 
the hill above me was the hut. Its every 
window was a blaze of light. It was the 
one dominating, scintillating building of 



THE LIGHTS OF WAR 185 

the town, a big double hut. When I climbed 
the hill to this hut I found it crowded to 
its limits with men from everywhere. The 
rest of the town was dark and there was 
little life, but here was the pulse of social 
life and comradeship, and here was the one 
blaze and glory of light. 

The other sight that I shall not forget 
was up within a few hundred yards of the 
German lines. It was night. We were re- 
turning from our furtherest hut "down the 
line." We met a crowd of American sol- 
diers tramping through the snow and mud 
and cold. They were shivering even as they 
walked. We stopped the machine and gave 
them a lift. I asked one of the lads where 
he was going. He said: "Down to the *Y' 

hut in ." I said: "Where is your camp ? " 

He replied: "Up at ." I said: "Why, 

boy, that's four miles away from the hut." 
"We don't care. We walk it every night. 
It's the only warm place in reach and the 
only place where we can be where there are 



186 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

lights at night and where we can get to 
see the fellows and write a letter. We stay- 
there for an hour or two and tramp back 

through this (censored) mud to our 

billets." 

And of all the lights o* war one must 
know that the lights of the Y. M. C. A. 
huts cast their beams not only into the 
hearts of these lads but across the world, 
and sometimes I think across the eternities, 
for in these huts innumerable lads are see- 
ing the light that never was on land or sea, 
and are finding the light that lights the 
way to Home. And these are the lights o' 
war. 



XIII 

SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 

f I ^HERE is laughter and song and sun- 
*■* shine among our boys in France. Let 
every mother and father be sure of that. 
Your boys are always lonely for home and 
for you, but they are not depressed, and 
they are there to stay until the job is done. 
There are times of unutterable loneliness, 
but usually they are a buoyant, happy, 
human crowd of American boys. 

Those of us who have lived with them, 
slept with them, eaten with them, come 
back with no sense of gloom or depression. 
I say to you that the most buoyant, happy, 
hopeful, confident crowd of men in the 
wide world is the American army in France. 

If you could see them back of the lines, 
even within sound of the guns, playing a 
game of ball; if you could see them putting 
on a minstrel show in a Y. M. C. A. hotel 

187 



188 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

in Paris; if you could see a team of white 
boys playing a team of negro boys; if you 
could see a whole regiment go in swimming; 
if you could see them in a track meet, you 
would know that, in spite of war, they are 
living normal lives, with just about the 
same proportion of sunshine and sorrow 
as they find at home, with the sunshine 
dominant. 

Some Silhouettes of Sunshine gleam 
against the background of war like scintil- 
lating diamonds and 

"Send a thrill of laughter through the framework 
of your heart; 
And warm your inner being 'til the tear drops 
want to start." 

There was that watch-trading incident 
on the Toul line. 

The Americans had only been there a 
week, but it hadn't taken them long to 
get acquainted with the French soldiers. 
About all the two watch-trading Americans 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 189 

knew of French was "Oui ! Oui !" and they 
used this every minute. 

The American soldiers had a four-dollar 
Ingersoll watch, and this illuminated time- 
piece had caught the eye of the French sol- 
dier. He, in turn, had an expensive, jew- 
elled, Swiss-movement pocket-watch. The 
American knew its value and wanted it. 

They stood and argued. Several times 
during the interesting transaction the Amer- 
ican shrugged his shoulders and walked 
away as if to say: "Oh, I don't want your 
old watch. It isn't worth anything." 

Then they would get together again, 
and the gesticulating would begin all over; 
the machine-gun staccato of "Oui Oui's" 
would rattle again, and the argument 
would continue, without either one of the 
contracting parties knowing a word of the 
other's language. 

At last I saw the American soldier un- 
strap his Ingersoll and hand it over to the 
Frenchman, who, in turn, pulled out the 



190 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

good Swiss-movement watch, and both 
parties to the transaction went off happy, 
for each had gotten what he wanted. 

One of the funniest things that happened 
in France while I was there was told me 
by a wounded boy one Sunday afternoon 
back of the Notre Dame cathedral. He was 
invalided from the Chateau-Thierry scrap 
in which the American marines had played 
such a heroic part. /He was a member of 
the marines, and was slightly wounded. 
He saw that I was a secretary, and thought 
to play a good joke on me. He pulled out 
of his breast-pocket a small black thing 
that looked and was bound just like a 
Bible. Its corner was dented, and it was 
plain to be seen that a bullet had hit it, 
and that that book had stopped its death- 
dealing course. 

I should have been warned by a gleam 
that I saw in his eyes, but was not. I said: 
"So you see that it's a good thing to be 
carrying a Bible around in your pocket ? " 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 191 

"Yes, that saved my life last week," he 
said impressively. Then he showed me the 
hole in his blouse where it had hit. The 
hole was still torn and ragged. In the mean- 
time I was opening what I thought was his 
Bible. 

It was a deck of cards. 

I can hear that fine American lad's 
laughter yet. It rang like the bells of the 
old cathedral itself, in the shadow of which 
we stood. His laughter startled the group 
of old men playing checkers on a park 
bench into forgetting their game and join- 
ing in the fun. Everybody stopped to see 
what the fun was about. That lad had a 
good one on the secretary, and he was en- 
joying it as much as the secretary himself. 

Then he said: "Now I'll tell you a good 
story to make up for fooling you." 

"You had better," I said with a sheepish 
grin. 

Then he began: 

"There was a fellow named Rosenbaum 



192 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

brought in with me last week to the Paris 
hospital, wounded in three places. They 
put me beside him and he told me his story. 

"It was at Belleau Wood and the 
Americans were plunging through to the 
other side driving the Boche before them. 
This Jewish boy is from New York City, 
and one of the favorites of the whole ma- 
rine outfit. He had gotten separated from 
his friends. Suddenly he was confronted 
by a German captain with a belching 
automatic revolver. The Hun got him in 
the shoulder with the first shot. Then the 
American made a lunge with his bayonet, 
and ran the captain through the neck, but 
not before the captain shot him twice 
through the left leg. The two fell together. 
When the boy from New York came to 
consciousness he reached out and there 
was the dead German officer lying beside 
him. 

"The boy took off the captain's helmet 
first, and pulled it over to himself. Then 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 193 

he took his revolver and his cartridge-belt 
and piled them all in a little pile. Then he 
took off his shoes and his trousers and 
every stitch of clothes that the officer had 
on, and painfully strapped them around 
himself under his own blouse. After he had 
done this he strapped the officer's belt on 
himself. When the stretcher-bearers got to 
him and had taken him to a first-aid and 
the nurses took his clothes off, they found 
the officer's outfit. 

"'Say, boy, are you a walking pawn- 
shop?' the good-natured doctor said, and 
proceeded to take the souvenirs away. 

"This was the military procedure, but 
the New York boy cried and said: 'I'll die 
on your hands if you take them away.' 

"He was a serious case, and so they 
humored him and let him keep his sou- 
venirs, and when I saw them take him out 
to a base hospital this morning, he still 
had them strapped to him, with a grin on 
his face like a darky eating watermelon." 



194 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

"What did you say his name was?" I 
asked. 

"Rosenbaum," the boy replied. "Rosen- 
baum from New York." 

"Say, if they'd only recruit a regiment 
like that from America, we'd send the 
whole German army back to Berlin naked," 
added another soldier who was standing 
near. 

Then we all had another good laugh, 
which in its turn disturbed the old men 
playing checkers on the bench under the 
trees back of Notre Dame. But the soldier 
who told me the story added thoughtfully 
a truth that every one in France knows. 

"At that, I'm tellin' you, boy, there 
aren't any braver soldiers in the American 
army than them Jewish boys from New 
York. I got 'o hand it to them." 

"Yes, we all do," I replied. 

This good-natured raillery goes on all 
over the army, for it is a cosmopolitan 
crowd, such as never before wore the uni- 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 195 

form of the United States, and each group, 
the negro group, the Italian group, the 
Jewish group, the Slav group, the Western 
group, the Southern group, the Eastern 
group, all have their little fun at the ex- 
pense of the others, and out of it all comes 
much sunshine and laughter, and no bit- 
terness. 

The Jewish boy loves to repeat a good 
joke on his own kind as well as the others. 
I myself saw the letter that a Jewish boy 
was writing to his uncle in New York, 
eulogizing the Y. M. C. A. He was not an 
educated lad, but he was a wonderfully 
sincere boy, and he pleaded his cause well. 
He had been treated so well by the "Y" 
that he wanted his uncle to give all his 
spare cash to that great organization. 
This is the letter: 

"Dear Uncle: 

"This here Y. M. C. A. is the goods. 
They give you chocolate when you're goin' 



196 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

into the trenches and they gives you choc- 
olate when you're comin' out and they don't 
charge you nothin' for it neither. If you are 
givin' any money don't you give it to none 
of them Red Crosses nor to none of them 
Salvation Armies, nor to none of them 
Knights of Columbuses; but you give it 
to them Y. M. C. A.'s. They treat you 
right. They have entertainments for you 
and wrestlin' matches, and they give you 
a place to write. And what's more, Uncle 
they don't have no respect fer no religion. 

"Yours, 

"Bill." 

Yes, France is full of Silhouettes of Sun- 
shine. There was the eloquent Y. M. C. A. 
secretary. And while he didn't exactly know 
it, he too was adding his unconscious ray 
of light to a dull and desolate world. 

The Gothas had come over Paris the 
night before, and so had a group of some 
one hundred and fifty new secretaries. The 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 197 

Gothas had played havoc with two blocks 
of buildings on a certain Paris street be- 
cause of the fact that the bombs they 
dropped had severed the gas-mains. The 
result did have a look of desolation I'll 
have to admit. So far the new secretaries 
had done no damage. 

Now there is one thing common to all 
the newly arrived in France, be they Y. 
M. C. A. secretaries, Knights of Colum- 
bus workers, Red Cross men, or just the 
common garden variety of "investigators," 
and that is that for about two weeks they 
are alert to hear the bloodiest, most drippy, 
and desolate-with-danger stories that they 
can hear, for the high and holy purpose of 
writing back home to their favorite paper, 
or to their wives or sweethearts, of how near 
they were to getting killed; of how the 
bombs fell just a few minutes before or just 
a few minutes after they were "on that 
very spot"; of how the raid came the very 
night after they were in London or Paris; 



198 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

of how just after they had walked along 
a certain street the Big Bertha had dropped 
a shell there; of how the night after they 
had slept in a certain hotel down in Nancy 
the Germans blew it up. We're all alike 
the first week, and staid war correspondents 
are no exception to the rule. It gets them 
all. 

I came on my friend telling this crowd 
of eager new secretaries of the damage 
that the Gothas had done the night before. 
There they stood in a corner of the hotel 
with open ears, eyes, and mouths. Most of 
them were on their toes ready to make a 
break for their rooms and get all the hor- 
rible details down in their letters home 
and their diaries before it escaped them. 
They were torn between a fear that they 
would forget some of the horrid details 
and for fear some other fellow would get 
the big story back home to the local paper 
before they could get it there. When I 
came in, this nonchalant narrator was hav- 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 199 

ing the time of his young life. He was 
revelling in description. Color and fire and 
blood and ruin and desecration flowed from 
his eloquent lips like water over Niag- 
ara. 

When I got close enough to hear, he was 
at his most climactic and last period of elo- 
quence. He made a gesture with one hand, 
waving it gracefully into the air full length, 
with these words: "Why, gentlemen, I 
didn't see anything worse at the San 
Francisco earthquake." 

In three seconds that crowd had dis- 
appeared, each to his own letter, and each 
to his own diary. Not a detail must escape. 
How wonderful it would be to describe that 
awful destruction, and say at the end of 
the letter: "And this happened just the 
night before we reached Paris." 

Only the vivid artist of description and 
myself remained in the hotel lobby, and 
having heard him mention San Francisco, 
my own home, I was naturally curious and 



200 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

wanted to talk a bit over old times, so I 
went up to the gentleman and said: "I 
heard you say to that gang that you hadn't 
seen anything worse at the San Francisco 
earthquake, so I thought I'd have a chat 
about San Francisco with you." 

"Why, I was never in San Francisco in 
my life," he said with a grin. 

"But you said to those boys, 'I didn't 
see anything worse at the San Francisco 
earthquake,' " I replied. 

"Well, I didn't, for I wasn't there. I just 
gave them guys what they was lookin' for 
in all its horrible details, didn't I? Ain't 
they satisfied ? Well, so am I, bo." 

This story has a meaning all its own in 
addition to the fact that it produced one 
of the bright spots in my experiences in 
France. That eloquent secretary represents 
a type who will tell the public about any- 
thing he thinks it wants to know about the 
"horrible details" of war in France, and 
facts do not baffle his inventive genius. 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 201 

One characteristic of the American sol- 
dier in France is his absolute fearlessness 
about dangers. He doesn't know how to be 
afraid. He wants to see all that is going 
on. The French tap their heads and say 
he is crazy, a gesture they have learned 
from America. And they have reason to 
think so. When the "alert" blows for an air- 
raid the French and English have learned to 
respect it. Not so the American soldier. 

"Think I'm comin' clear across that 
darned ocean to see something, and then 
duck down into some blamed old cellar or 
cave and not see anything that's goin' on ! 
Not on your life. None o' that for muh ! 
I'm going to get right out on the street 
where I can see the whole darned show !" 

And that's just what he does. I've been 
in some twenty-five or thirty air-raids in 
four or five cities of France, and I have 
never yet seen many Americans who took 
to the "abris." They all want to see what's 
going on, and so they hunt the widest 



202 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

street, and the corner at that, to watch 
the air-raids. 

One night during a heavy raid in Paris, 
when the French were safely hidden in the 
"abris," because they had sense enough to 
protect themselves, I saw about twenty so- 
ber but hilarious American soldiers march- 
ing down the middle of the boulevard, arm 
in arm, singing "Sweet Adelaide" at the top 
of their voices, while the bombs were drop- 
ping all over Paris, and a continuous bar- 
rage from the anti-aircraft guns was can- 
nonading until it sounded like a great front- 
line battle. 

That night I happened to be watching 
the raid myself from a convenient street- 
corner. Unconsciously I stood up against 
a street-lamp with a shade over me, made 
of tin about the size of a soldier's steel 
helmet. Along came a French street-walker, 
looked at me standing there under that 
tiny canopy, and with a laugh said as she 
swiftly passed me, "C'est un abri, mon- 




The air-raid had not dampened her sense of humor. 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 203 

sieur?" looking up. The air-raid had not 
dampened her sense of humor even if it 
had destroyed her trade for that night. 

Another story illustrative of the never- 
die spirit of the Frenchwomen, in spite of 
their sorrows and losses: One night, when 
the rain was pouring in torrents, a desolate, 
chilly night, I saw a girl of the streets 
plying her trade, standing where the rain 
had soaked her through and through. 
Were her spirits dampened? Was she dis- 
couraged? Was she blue? No; she stood 
there in the rain humming the air of an 
opera, oblivious to the fact that she was 
soaked through and through, and cold to 
the bone. 

This is the undying spirit of France. I 
do not know whether this girl was driven 
to her trade because she had lost her hus- 
band in the war, but I do know that many 
have been. I do not know anything about 
her life. I do know that there she stood, 
soaked through and through, a frail child 



204 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

of the street, plying her trade, and singing 
in the rain. The silhouette of this frail 
girl and her spirit is typical of France: 
"Her head though bloody is unbowed." 
Somehow that sight gave me strength. 

The reaction of the German submarining 
in American waters on the boys "Over 
There" will be interesting to home-folks. 
When the news got to France that sub- 
marines were plying in American waters 
near New York, did it produce consterna- 
tion ? No ! Did it produce regret ? No ! Did 
it make them mad ? No ! 

It made them laugh. All over France the 
boys laughed, and laughed; laughed up- 
roariously; doubled up and laughed. I 
found this everywhere. I do not attempt to 
explain it. It just struck their funny bones. 
I heard one fellow say: "Now the next 
best thing would be for a sub some night, 
when there was nobody in the offices, to 
throw a few shells into one of those New 
York skyscrapers." 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 205 

"I'll say so ! I'll say so !" was the laugh- 
ing reply. 

"Wow! There'd be somethin' doin' at 
home then, wouldn't there ? " my friend the 
artillery captain said with a grin. 

But about the funniest thing I heard 
along the sunshine-producing line was not 
in France but coming home from France, 
on the transport. It came from a prisoner 
on the transport who was sentenced to fif- 
teen years for striking a top-sergeant. 

One night outside of my stateroom I 
heard some words, and then a blow struck, 
and a man fall. There was a general com- 
motion. 

The next morning the fellow who struck 
the blow was summoned before the captain 
of the transport. 

"See here, my man, you are already sen- 
tenced for fifteen years, and it's a serious 
offense to strike a man on the high seas." 

"I didn't strike him on the high seas, 
sir, I struck him on the jaw." 



206 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

The captain was baffled, but went on: 

"What did you hit the man for?" 

"He argued with me. I can't stand it to 
be argued with." 

"But you shouldn't strike a man and 
split his mouth open just because he dis- 
agrees with you," said the captain severely. 

"I just don't seem to be able to stand it 
to have a guy argue with me," he replied, 
not abashed in the slightest. 

"Well, you go to your bunk. I'll think it 
over and tell you in the morning what I'll 
do about it," said the captain, and turned 
away. 

But the man waited. The captain, seeing 
this, turned and said: "Well, what do you 
want?" 

"All I got to say, captain, is that you 
mustn't let any of them guys argue with me 
again, for if they do I'll do the same thing 
over if you give me fifty years for it. I 
just can't stand it to have a man argue 
with me." 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 207 

Silhouettes of Sunshine ? France is full of 
them. There were the fields full of a million 
blood-red poppies back in Brittany, and 
the banks of old-gold broom blooming along 
a thousand stone walls; there were the 
negro stevedores marching to work, winter 
and summer, rain or shine, night or day, 
always whistling or singing as they marched, 
to the wonderment of French and English 
alike. Their spirits never seemed to be 
dampened. They always marched to music 
of their own making. There was that base- 
ball game, when an entire company of 
negroes, watching their team play a white 
team, at the climax of the game when one 
negro boy had knocked a home run, ran 
around the bases with him, more than two 
hundred laughing, shouting, grinning, sing- 
ing, yelling negroes, helping to bring in the 
score that won the game. Then there was 
that Sunday morning when several white 
captains decided that their negro boys 
should have a bath. They took their boys 



208 SOLDIER SILHOUETTES 

down to an ocean beach. It was a bit 
chilly. The negroes stripped at order, but 
they didn't like the idea of going into that 
cold ocean water. One captain solved the 
difficulty. He took his own clothes off. He 
got in front of his men. He lined them up in 
formation. Then he said: "Now, boys, we're 
going to play that ocean is full of Ger- 
mans. You stevedores are always com- 
plaining about not getting up front, and 
you tell me what you'd do to the Germans 
if you once got up front. Now I'm going to 
see how much nerve you've got. When I 
say * Forward! March!' it is a military 
order. I'm going to lead you into that 
water. We are going in military formation. 

"'Forward! March!'" 

And that company of black soldiers 
marched into that cold ocean water, dread- 
ing it with all their souls but soldiers to 
the core, without a quaver, eyes to the 
front, heads up, chests out, unflinchingly, 
up to their knees, up to their waists, up 



SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE 209 

to their chins, when the captain shouted 
"As you were !" and such a hilarious, shout- 
ing, laughing, splashing, jumping, yelling, 
fun-filled hour as followed the world never 
saw. The gleaming of white teeth, the flash- 
ing of ebony limbs through green water 
and under sparkling sunlight that Sunday 
morning was full of a fine type of fun and 
laughter that made the world a better place 
to live in, and certainly a cleaner place. 

War is grim. War is serious. War is full 
of hurt and hate and pain and heartache 
and loneliness and wounds, and mud and 
death and dearth; but the American sol- 
dier spends more time laughing than he 
does crying; more time singing than he does 
moaning; more time playing than he does 
moping; more times shouting than he does 
whimpering; more time hoping than he 
does despairing; and because of this effer- 
vescent spirit of sunshine and laughter his 
morale is the best morale that any army in 
the history of the world has ever shown. 



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